This should be a pretty natural extension of what I did when I did the top 100 of the 2000s way back in the day. As with most of my lists I’m disqualifying documentaries and I will not be cheating and lumping trilogies or doing any kind of ties (with arguably one exception). I’m also sticking strictly to American release dates for eligibility, which will benefit some and harm others. Also as with pretty much any list like this movies from the final year of eligibility (2019) are probably at a disadvantage. Finally, my list is more or less set at least in terms of what movies are making it, so if I see anything from the decade latter on they’re s.o.l.
Jump to: #90, #80, #70, #60, #50, #40, #30, #20, #10
100. The Shape of Water
 |
|
I tend to be tough on Guillermo del Toro, in part because I think his potential is unlimited when he gets out of his own way, so when he squanders his talents on silliness like Pacific Rim it disappoints me. I also didn’t much care for his 2015 film Crimson Peak, which was bogged down by some weak scares (and yes, it is trying to be scary) and a script where the audience is way ahead of the protagonist in a frustrating way. He mostly got things back on track with his 2017 film The Shape of Water though I was kind of tough on it as well at first if only because it kind of felt like the movie I had hoped he’d make around 2010 and be on to other things by the end of the decade, but in retrospect, it was probably better late than never. What I didn’t expect was for the rest of the public to finally be primed for his work and that the rather outlandish fairytale he delivered would become among the more improbable Best Picture Winners in Oscar history, at least in terms of subject matter. The themes of tolerance and of free spirits fighting back against oppressive societal conformity are all a bit on the nose, but it’s hard to call a movie about a lady boinking a fish monster uncreative and the movie also delivers a lot of very memorable moments and set pieces like the flooded bathroom and the throwback musical number late in the film. When a movie is doing all that a lot of my complaints about it just seem a bit petty in the long run.
99. Baby Driver
 |
|
There are a lot of movies that are going to be on this list because they’re meaningful or dramatic or innovative but Baby Driver is mostly just on it because it’s a fuckin’ blast. I’m not the world’s biggest Edgar Wright fan but there’s little doubt that this, his fifth movie since his breakout Shaun of the Dead, is an almost perfect execution of what he was trying to do. Though still a humorous film, this is probably the first of Wright’s movies that probably can’t be called a comedy and is instead more of an action/heist thing but some even went so far as to call it a musical as it more than any other film is intrinsically tied to its soundtrack. The film is wall to wall popular music that the protagonist is listening to on iPods and throughout the film almost every motion is set to the beats of the various songs in a way that looks like it must have been just the biggest pain in the ass to accomplish. Even looking past that, this is still a very colorful and exciting action movie unto itself with some really well-staged action scenes and car chases which is also bolstered by an all-star cast that really seem to be in tune with the spirit of the whole thing. And as fun-loving as the film can be it isn’t completely weightless and does manage to build some legitimate interest in its characters and you do care when some of them end up getting killed off. Still not exactly the most substantive movie of the decade by any means, but it’s one I’ll probably be revisiting a lot.
98. Cloud Atlas
 |
|
When the Wachowskis made The Matrix in 1999 people expected them to be the makers of innovative action cinema the rest of their careers and while that has sort of been true their muses have taken them into some increasingly strange directions that have not always been in line with what audiences wanted. One of those strange directions that actually worked for me was Cloud Atlas, the 2012 film they made with Tom Tykwer based on David Mitchell’s novel of the same name. I had read Mitchell’s novel, which covers six different stories set in six different time periods and incorporating an unconventional symmetrical format, before seeing the movie and was skeptical about how easily it was going to be brought to the screen. I will say I have some issues with some of the choices they made in adaptation: that they have the same actors playing roles in each time period is cinematically interesting in a number of ways but does lead to some questionable makeup choices and also forges connections between characters that were not intended by the source material and the decision to intercut the stories throughout rather than following the original format may well have led to a lot of confused audience members. But the film does also improve some of the book’s problems and certainly makes the chronologically final story more palatable than trying to interpret the weird invented language Mitchell wrote that chapter in. I’m not sure what the experience of watching this thing would be to someone who hasn’t read the book and there are definitely some mistakes it makes along the way but I can’t help but be taken by the ambition of the whole thing and the exuberance with which the Wachowskis and Tykwer dive right into this wild project.
97. Avengers: Infinity War
 |
|
Given the box office dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe throughout the 2010s decade and how many hours of pleasure they gave me between them all it feels like I do owe them some representation on the top 100 even if I probably like them more as a collective than I do any individual film. If I am going to place one MCU film in to represent them all it only makes sense to make it one of the Avengers movies given that those films kind of combined a lot of what made this series so special. I was tempted to put the original The Avengers for how well it set the template and sort of springboarded the franchise into dominance and an argument could also be made for Avengers: Endgame given that it brought everything together into a massively profitable event, but the movie that ultimately seems to be the best representation of what these movies managed to get right is the penultimate Avengers movie: Avengers: Infinity War. Infinity War did a great job of juggling a lot of storylines while also introducing a shockingly well-realized villain in Thanos. Like a lot of Marvel’s movies it really gets that perfect balance between storytelling, character interaction, and action set-pieces. But what really put Infinity War over the top was that big cliffhanger ending. Obviously it was easy to watch that cynically and assume that it would be undone (which is essentially was in Endgame) but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a shocking way to end one of these movies that the effect it had on the theater I was watching it in was one of my most memorable cinematic moments of the decade. In a decade full of movies where superheroes were fighting to keep glowing MacGuffins from killing everyone there was something really affecting about seeing what happens when one of those doomsday devices actually worked.
96. Blue Jasmine
 |
|
The 2010s were the decade when it was decided that Woody Allen was “canceled” or at least the very late 2010s, which is why his latest film has not even been distributed in the United States. I don’t want to get into the ethics of whether or not this is justified but I will say that as long as he is making movies that I have access to I intend to give them a fair shake and I’m certainly not going to pretend I dislike them when I do in fact like them quite a bit. In fact this decade has been, artistically, about as fruitful as any decade for him. Midnight in Paris was of course a popular hit for him on a level we’ll probably never see again, and some of his “lesser” works from the decade like Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man (while admittedly minor) are better than you’ve probably heard and both Cafe Society and Wonder Wheel presented us with what Allen can do when given a blank check by a financially irresponsible streaming service. But the Woody Allen film from the decade that is most clearly a home run is probably his 2013 film Blue Jasmine, which is essentially a modern retelling of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” and focuses on the former wife of a New York high finance figure who is going through something of a mental break and visits her sister in San Francisco. Clearly this character is something of a Blanche DuBois figure, her sister is Stella, and her brother in law is Stanley, but the film doesn’t just seem like a repeat of that play and does find a number of smart ways to modernize it. Cate Blanchet is extraordinary in the film and won the Academy Award for her work and at this rate will probably be the last person Allen directs to an Oscar win and the whole film is like a wonderful little sad portrait of someone who’s become psychologically trapped in a prison of their own making.
95. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
 |
|
American remakes of foreign movies are usually terrible ideas but there are exceptions and I would argue that David Fincher’s 2011 version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of them. This isn’t to say that the film is doing anything fundamentally smarter or more enlightened than the previous Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel of the same name, both are fundamentally just enlightened potboilers, but I don’t think that the first adaptation is particularly well made and the sheer filmmaking on display in Fincher’s version really eclipses it. It’s a story that seemed almost tailor-made for Fincher’s dark sensibilities and his interest in staging meticulously filmed suspense sequences. Fincher really went all out here stylistically; he and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth go all out with their compositions here and it’s really just a sight to behold. Rooney Mara also gives what should have been a true star-making performance as the title character and the rest of the cast is pretty solid too. The one thing that sort of sticks in the craw about the film is that it pretty clearly sets up sequels based on Larson’s second and third novels and those sequels never came. Though the film made $100 million dollars domestic, which is hardly chump change for something like this, it was below expectations and wasn’t enough to justify a full trilogy of Fincher directed big budget R-rated thrillers and while there were some rumblings of Hollywood making it happen Fincher eventually moved on. On one hand it might have been for the best for Fincher to have been able to move on rather than be tied down to one franchise it would have been cool if this had been his Dark Knight trilogy and it doesn’t feel great for this one to be dangling there as a semi-unfinished story.
94. Moonrise Kingdom
 |
|
In 2012 Wes Anderson had gotten a pretty bad reputation. The Life Aquatic had sort of ended his honeymoon with the critics and they really didn’t have patience for him when he made The Darjeeling Limited. Looking back I think there’s plenty to like about both of those movies, but at the time it seemed like there was blood in the water. He won some fans back with Fantastic Mr. Fox but people weren’t sure if that was a fluke. It was with Moonrise Kingdom that people finally settled down and decided to accept Anderson for what it was. In many ways the film is emblematic of Anderson’s usual themes in that it’s about children who act like adults and adults who act like children and it also throbs with nostalgia for the 1960s… a decade Anderson wasn’t actually old enough to have lived through. However, there’s a lot of outdoor scenes in the movie and that acts as something of a challenge for him in using his signature style but he consistently found creative ways to handle that. Ultimately the film uses as much artifice as any of his work but there’s a bit more relatable humanity at its center in the way he sort of tries to replicate old-school YA novels and give his young characters an adventure of sorts and to get the viewer genuinely interested in their plight. Grand Budapest Hotel was the more popular Wes Anderson film this decade, but to me Moonrise Kingdom was the real triumph.
93. Life of Pi
 |
|
Early in the movie Life of Pi a character asserts that this is would be a story that would make someone believe in god, which is a pretty bold thing to start a film with, and it certainly didn’t succeed on that front with me but it certainly gets you attention. This 2012 film is an adaptation of an early 2000s novel by Yann Martel that almost certainly seemed unfilmable when it was first published and yet Ang Lee seemed to think he’d be up to the task and certain technologies that were just coming into their own at the time. The film is largely set in the open sea, which was created largely through a watertank surrounded by green screen and heavily involves dealings between a human and a tiger which was created using CGI that wasn’t exactly seamless but certainly looked great for the most part. It was also one of about three Hollywood movies that actually managed to creative and worthwhile things with the 3D craze that emerged in the wake of Avatar and I think it actually lost a lot when it was put onto the small screen and in 2D. Personally, I actually wasn’t expecting much from the film but when I first saw it I was entranced by what Lee was doing to bring this story to the screen and also by it’s provocative ending which invites the viewer to interpret what they’ve seen in one of two ways which serves as something of an allegory for how religious faith works. I probably interpreted it differently than the film wanted me to but I like that it gave people the choice just the same.
92. Blade Runner 2049
 |
|
Making a sequel to Blade Runner was a bad idea. Making a sequel to Blade Runner thirty five years after the original was a bad idea. And making a sequel to Blade Runner during an even dumber and less patient era for studio filmmaking than the 1980s was also a bad idea… so how did things go so right? Somehow director Denis Villeneuve managed to make a Blade Runner movie without turning it into something more action oriented than the original which was just as slow and meditative while also capturing its visual style beautifully and even preserving a lot of the ambiguities about the original film’s mysteries. That’s a lot of things going right and it also adds some interesting ideas of its own like the new protagonist it creates who manages to mirror Dekkard without feeling like a copy of him and other little elements like his hologram assistant/girlfriend also help to make the movie its own thing rather than just a nostalgia trip for a certain kind of film buff. Where the movie is less successful is less to do with how it handles the original material and more to do with the original story it comes up with. I don’t want to get into it here but the villain is weak and investigation that the protagonist goes through never quite fits together in a satisfying way and certain questions are brought up but not satisfactorily explored. Still Villeneuve pulled off something of a miracle here by making a Blade Runner sequel that’s as legit as it is and I would be curious to see if someone tries to make a third film in another thirty five years with a 110 year old Harrison Ford.
91. Midsommar
 |
|
Among the top names in “elevated horror” that emerged in the 2010s was Ari Astor, who had a big one-two punch late in the decade in the form of the films Hereditary and Midsommar. While Hereditary is almost certainly the scarier of the two films Midsommar is the more unique and all around more refined of Astor’s films and generally speaking the superior film. Astor has something of a push and pull relationship with the conventions of horror. He’s not afraid to deliver the gore when it suits him and he’ll through people looking for traditional horror stuff a bone here and there (in this case his characters more or less fit into the usual slasher movie archetypes) but he’s generally more interested in subverting things which he obviously does here by setting a horror movie in northern Sweden during the time of the midnight sun, meaning he can’t have a single real night scene for much of the film. The film also avoids a lot of the tropes associated with modern haunting films and instead harkens back to the late 60s sub-genre of “folk horror” and The Wicker Man in particular in its focus on a pagan cult that may or may not be malevolent. Like Hereditary it’s also got a very personal dynamic at its core as it deals with a woman who is processing an extreme trauma and her boyfriend’s general inability to support her through it. As such the film becomes a sort of extreme breakup movie you can imagine while also working simply as this journey into a really weird environment that the audience is always on edge about.
90. Whiplash
 |
|
It’s actually pretty rare for “Sundance movies” to come out of nowhere and impress as much as Whiplash did but impress it most certainly did. Set in the world of collegiate jazz bands, the film looked at a rather harsh mentor/mentee relationship in which a jazz drummer is desperate to impress the acclaimed conductor who in turn wants to mold this young talent into one of the greats but goes about through techniques that could pretty clearly be considered abusive. This push/pull of a person in power abusing that power over a subordinate is a theme that takes on new resonance in the wake of #MeToo even if it comes at it from a completely different and less extreme direction. The film obviously boasts an incredible supporting performance by J. K. Simmons, who was the center of attention when the film first came out but in the years since it has become just as notable for the fact that it signaled the emergence of the incredibly talented young filmmaker Damien Chazelle. Contrary to popular belief this was not Chazelle’s first film (that would be Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), but it certainly felt like a first film to people and the fact that Chazelle managed to come on so strong was really impressive. The film seemed to be edited with a special intensity and you also really get the sense that he cares quite a bit about this big band music and presents the drumming in a way that is both understandable and exciting.
89. The Raid
 |
|
The Raid (AKA The Raid: Redemption) is not exactly what you’d call a deep movie. On the contrary it’s borderline plotless, it’s populated by one dimensional characters, and is largely devoid of thematic exploration… it’s also totally badass. The film was produced in Indonesia by the British director Gareth Evans and had an incredibly simple story: police raid a project high-rise controlled by a crime lord only to find themselves trapped inside and forced to fight their way out. Not exactly the most accurate look at how police actions work, but that’s beside the point, the point is that the film is a relentless parade of some absolutely hardcore martial arts action once the cops realize that the criminals have the upper hand. Star Iko Uwais immediately emerged as the preeminent action star of the 2010s and his Pencak Silat style looks noticeably different from what we’ve long seen from Hong Kong and elsewhere. But what really sets the movie apart is its sheer brutality. Unlike the borderline pacifist fighters we usually see in these movies, Uwais’ character is most definitely killing his opponents as he fights his way through these hallways and he does it in some pretty creative ways at times. The brutality and high body count anticipated the John Wick films, which would bring this style to the mainstream, but this was in many ways the originator and one of the most influential action films of recent years.
88. Ash is Purest White
 |
|
The most important (mainland) Chinese filmmaker of the 90s was probably Tian Zhuangzhuang, and the most important Chinese filmmaker of the 00s was probably Zhang Yimou (who had a decent claim to the 90s as well), but the most important Chinese filmmaker of the 2010s was almost certainly Jia Zhangke, who had been something of a festival fixture through much of the 2000s but started getting larger budgets to make splashier statements in this decade starting with 2013’s A Touch of Sin and continuing to 2016’s Mountains May Depart but his most recent film Ash is Purest White is probably his best to date, at least among the films I’ve seen. The film takes the form of a triptych about three stages in the life of a woman named Zhao, who goes to jail after helping her mobbed up boyfriend then gets out and has to find him again and figure out if he still cares about her and what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. In the background of all this is a swiftly modernizing China, which is something you should not ignore if you know anything about Zhangke. Zhangke is primarily a social critic, not necessarily in a way that will get him in trouble with the CPC, but he’s a guy with decidedly mixed feelings about the direction his country is going and the way it’s being taken over by Western influences and values including an obsession with wealth. Like a lot of crime films this has a slightly ambiguous interest in the moral code of organized crime juxtaposed against the sometimes equally corrupt codes of society, but does not fall squarely on the side of either worldview.
87. 127 Hours
 |
|
In 2003 a wilderness survival story for the ages was born when Aron Ralston stumbled down from a canyon after having severed his own arm after five days of it having been trapped under a boulder. It was a hell of a story but not one that would have immediately been pegged as the subject of a movie, but after coming off his Oscar winning triumph of Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle decided he was up for the challenge. Boyle (who would otherwise have a pretty rough decade) applied his usual maximalist approach to the story using flashbacks to fill in Ralston’s life story and also utilizing a sort of video diary Ralston made along with some kinetic camera angles and soundtrack selections. A lot of critics didn’t like this approach and would have preferred a simpler film that focused instead on Ralston’s loneliness and desperation but I disagree, firstly because I think that Gerry approach to this story would have actually been the more obvious and less creative way to go, and secondly because that seems like the kind of thing you’d probably rather have in theory than in practice. The film served as probably the best acting showcase that James Franco would get and despite what people think about him on the other end of the decade he really did great work here managing to capture his intense desperation while also making him into a likable person during the other sections of the movie. Of course the section of the movie that will likely go down in history more than the rest are the moments where Ralston has to finally do the self-amputation and Boyle does a great job of threading the needle here to make this seem visceral and painful while also remaining on the right side of tasteful.
86. Our Little Sister
 |
|
The Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has been extremely prolific this decade having made seven movies in ten years and even more impressively almost all of them were considered to be successes to some extent and with one (Shoplifters) even winning the Palm d’Or at Cannes. That film didn’t make my personal top 100 of the decade (though it was certainly in the running), instead I ended up selecting this film which critical consensus may well deem to be comparatively minor. Since it’s come out I’ve actually had a lot of trouble describing why the film works so well for me within Kore-eda’s filmography. It doesn’t tackle social reality in the way that something like Shoplifters does and it doesn’t have a high concept to hang itself on like his popular Like Father Like Son, but it makes up for it by having a unique power to put its viewer into a sort of trance as their absorbed into the lives on screen. The film is about a set of sisters who live a relatively normal life over the course of a summer in a big rural home and as you watch them you start to get an idea of what each of these women are like and what their lifestyle is like. On paper that sounds quite boring, but this isn’t some sort of experimental realist movie, it tells the story in a relatable way and has some pretty snazzy classical filmmaking style.
85. Julieta
 |
|
When Pedro Almodóvar made his 2019 film Pain and Glory it was celebrated as a comeback but as far as I was concerned he’d never really gone anywhere. In fact I think his previous film, Julieta, was the bigger achievement. Granted the film was relatively genteel compared to some of his boundary pushing earlier films (his other major achievement of the decade, The Skin I Live In, reflects the other extreme) but it is nonetheless a great melodrama that fits well with Almodóvar’s sensibilities. The film is based on the short story cycle “Runaway” by the Nobel Prize winning Canadian writer Alice Munro and was at one point meant to be his first English language project before he changed his mind and adapted the setting to Spain. I haven’t read that book but I am familiar with some of Munro’s other works and I could certainly recognize her voice here and it blends well with what Almodóvar is capable of. The film looks at a woman, one who you could say is well past the point of a nervous breakdown, and the film uses flashbacks to establish how she came to that point. The reasons for her trauma are personal and not overly sensational and you do really come to feel for her by the end of the film. It’s not a movie that really breaks new ground but it is affecting and an interesting new direction for Almodóvar to go in.
84. Captain Phillips
 |
|
I do remember when the MV Maersk Alabama was abducted by Somali pirates in early 2009 and remember the news media mostly viewing it as an early test of the recently elected Barrack Obama’s resolve when dealing with international incidents but the human story on the ground was kind of lost. Four years later the story came to the big screen helmed by the ideal filmmaker, Paul Greengrass, who had previously brought the September 11th attacks to the screen in visceral fashion with his landmark film United 93. Captain Phillips is a little closer to being a conventional thriller than that film was insomuch as it stars an A-list celebrity and features more in the way of scripted drama than that film, which was more of a historical re-enactment but Greengrass still films the movie with a sort of documentary intensity. Tom Hanks fits well as the titular captain and is allowed to be used differently than he usually is as Phillips is not necessarily a particularly warm figure and his work in a late scene where his character is in medical shock is among the finest moments of his long and illustrious career. Perhaps even more impressive is that the unknown actor Barkhad Abdi was able to stand toe-to-toe as the lead pirate attempting to take over the ship and the film generally does a great job of having sympathy for these Somali men who find themselves in way over their heads without trying to justify or excuse modern high seas piracy. Both as a tense thriller and as a study in human behavior under difficult circumstances this is a winning entry in a perfect example of the kind of thing I’d like to see Hollywood make more often.
83. The Tribe
 |
|
There are limits to how far a good gimmick will get you but sometimes a great gimmick greatly executed will be enough to make a film something of an instant classic on that basis alone. The Ukrainian film The Tribe is a great example of this. The story at its center about a prostitution ring operating out of a school for the deaf and its effect on the psyche of a young man hired to be something of an assistant pimp is a bit too simplistic to stand on its own and there are certain sensationalistic twists that I might otherwise not care for, but the film more than makes up for this with an ingenious format. As all the principle characters are deaf there is basically no spoken dialogue in the film at all and communication is done entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language which the director specifically intended to never be subtitled or translated in any way. This forces most viewers to engage with the storytelling in an entirely visual manner and intuit through context clues what the characters are saying to one another. In some ways this is a nod to the film language employed by the silent era, but the absence of a score and the presence of a rather rich soundtrack of ambient folly effects gives the whole film an almost eerie quiet rather than a true silence. Its director, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi hadn’t really made anything of note previously and as far as I can tell hasn’t made a film since (despite some overtures to Hollywood), but for this one film he came upon an idea that had some real teeth and executed it very well.
82. Marriage Story
 |
|
The opening scene of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is one of the best beginnings of any movie this decade. Having a movie about the end of a marriage start with direct proclamations about what made the marriage work so well in the first place was a clear stroke of brilliance and it’s an instinct that shows up again several times in the movie. I’m usually not the biggest Noah Baumbach fan, the dude tends to make unambitious movies that appeal mainly to insular crowds, but with this one you can tell he’s coming from a more personal place and is taking things a lot more seriously despite the fact that there’s actually still quite a bit of comedy in the movie. Adam Driver is quite good as a guy who spends a lot of the first half of the movie rather blind to the situation he’s gotten himself into in a way that’s frustrating but real and Scarlett Johansson is also really strong as a woman who’s finally finding her independence even though she doesn’t always go about asserting it in the most productive of ways. The film also takes a pretty hard, bordering on satirical, look at how the legal system functions during these proceedings with each lawyer involved representing something of a different legal approach to such things with some of them being less effective than others in rather telling ways. I do think the movie stumbles a little towards the end and places its big climactic argument scene a bit too early in a way that somewhat undermines what comes after, but the movie is otherwise a pretty big triumph and one of the definitive takes on its subject for the modern age.
81. The Martian
 |
|
I have a lot of movies on this list which take major artistic risks and try to make serious statements about the world. The Martian probably isn’t one of them… or maybe it is? To be sure the film certainly stands in stark contrast with much of the rest of what was happening in science fiction during this period given that it is filled with optimism about the possibilities of science and human ingenuity rather than dread at the horrors that future technology will unleash. Just compare it to the other high profile fictional space survival film of the decade, Gravity, which is a movie that opens with title cards about how life in space is impossible and proceeds to show its protagonist go from disaster to disaster and only make it by the skin of her teeth. The Martian by contrast suggests space as something of a new frontier that can become someone’s home at least temporarily with a little hard work and can do spirit, and it has a lot more disco music. Made in 2015 it’s something of a last gasp of that “hope and change” spirit that animated the beginning of the decade and ended definitively in 2016 when it became clear that we were truly living in the worst of all timelines and that we were completely fucked. But solid feel good movies like this are harder to make than people give them credit for, in fact it’s pretty much the platonic ideal of the “original Hollywood movie for adults” that we keep begging for when done right. It’s the kind of movie you’d find yourself watching over and over again on HBO during a time when watching movies on TV was still a thing, and if that isn’t the sign of a classic of a decade what is?
80. True Grit
 |
|
Though it obviously wasn’t a return to the genre’s golden age, the 2010s turned out to a be a pretty solid decade for westerns with major filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro González Iñárritu making major films in the genre and people like Kelly Reichardt, S. Craig Zahler, and John Maclean doing interesting experiments with the genre. Among the less likely filmmakers to do major things with the genre were Joel and Ethan Coen, and yet two of their films this decade were firmly in the western tradition. Their 2018 anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was more in keeping with their normal style and took a variety of approaches towards western revisionism but their bigger triumph within the genre was their 2010 remake of True Grit, which took a much more traditional approach to the genre and with great results. The film takes the 1969 John Wayne film and keeps the same basic story but gives it a much more mournful and elegiac tone and a degree of real artfulness that that earlier film sort of lacked. Jeff Bridges feels more legitimately run down than John Wayne did and Hailee Steinfeld emerged as a major talent in her role as the teen girl hiring him to hunt down her father’s killer. The film showed the Coen Brothers playing things a bit more straight than they usually do and show a great reverence towards the genre they’re working in but the movie is hardly humorless and they bring a lot of the movie simply by bringing their normal collaborators like Carter Burwell and Roger Deakins to the table and inspiring them to do some of their best work.
79. Birds of Passage
 |
|
My knowledge of contemporary South American cinema has largely been confined to a smattering of Brazilian filmmakers and the recent wave of movies out of Chile including the works of Pablo Larraín, who may well have been that continent’s finest talent this decade but the filmmaker who may well prove to be the best is the Columbian filmmaker Ciro Guerra, who in the second half of the decade hit us with the one-two punch of Embrace of the Serpent and Birds of Passage. Birds of Passage is probably the less acclaimed of the two and its release was rather mismanaged by The Orchard, who released the movie right as it was going out of business, but I think it’s still a great achievement in film. Like in his other acclaimed 2010s film Birds of Passage looks at the indigenous people of Columbia, but this time a group called the Wayuu who live in a dry area in northern part of the country and focuses on a man who is looking to pay the dowry for a woman he woos in a traditional matchmaking ritual and ends up getting into the narcotics trade in order to do it which turns into a sort of crime empire that ends up engulfing the entire village. So on its most basic level this is another “rise and fall” crime film but it doesn’t feel like some sort of lame Goodfellas ripoff at all. The milieu has something to do with this but beyond that the feel is a lot different; the film never indulges in the spoils of a life of crime and the characters feel more like tragic figures playing out a sort of fable that will end badly for all involved.
78. Gravity
 |
|
Gravity is a pretty shallow movie. You can maybe muster some sort of meaning out of the will to survive and persevere or something, but for the most part the movie is just the cinematic equivalent of a roller coaster ride. But is that a bad thing? I’m not sure I can make much of a deep thematic reading of King Kong either but that movie’s an acknowledged classic. Also, to be blunt, when your filmmaking is this good you can kind of get away with being surface level. The visual effects in the film were and are completely cutting edge and it was one of only a small handful of films from the big 3D boom of the 2010s that really truly earned the distinction of being a film what was best watched on the biggest screen possible and in 3D. A lot of people called Gravity a science fiction film, which is not really accurate given that it almost entirely barters in modern technology, instead it’s best to think of the movie as a pure suspense thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat as Sandra Bullock is constantly on the precipice of being killed in her attempts to survive an orbital disaster. It took Alfonso Cuaron something like six years to make the film, a length of time he ultimately thinks was too much and you can see why he scaled back and made a highly personal film afterwards, but the time and effort is all there on the screen and I personally certainly appreciate the effort he took to make a blockbuster like no other.
77. Little Women
 |
|
When I first heard that Greta Gerwig was making an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott my first thought was “eh, do we need another one of those?” But Gerwig pretty thoroughly proved me wrong with the final movie, which more than makes an identity of its own beyond its original source and in my view clearly eclipses her solid but slightly overhyped Lady Bird. I never read the Alcott novel but I had seen a bunch of the other adaptations of it and most of them had a lot of room for improvement and in many ways Gerwig managed to finally crack it, in part because she was bold enough to make some subtle but key changes to the text. Gerwig re-orders events in the story to give us an early glimpse at the characters as adults, a choice which helps the viewer differentiate the characters early on and also goes a long way to give them a much better idea of what’s on the line in these childhood interactions which just come off as anecdotal otherwise. Additionally she does a really clever metatexutal thing with the ending that leaves the audience with very modern issues to think about while still honoring the original text that she’s adapting. On top of that Gerwig assembled an amazing cast and managed to build a world for them to interact in. The production values are also stellar and Gerwig finds all sorts of smart, almost inexplicable ways to make the film feel modern despite being pretty firmly placed in the novel’s original 19th century setting without indulging in anachronisms. Even when you consider all that it still becomes easy to underestimate how impressive the movie is simply because Gerwig makes it all look easy, but really, knocking a “classic novel” adaptation out of the park like this is not easy at all.
76. Shame
 |
|
In-between his incredible debut feature Hunger and his Oscar winning third film 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen made the film Shame, which hasn’t had quite the legacy of those other two but which is a very strong film nonetheless. The film features Michael Fassbender in one of the larger showcases of his career playing a Wall Street executive with a debilitating sex addiction. This is not, however, an “issue movie” about his addiction so much as it’s a quiet character study about a deeply lonely man living in the center of a big city. Fassbender’s character has basically come to have his addiction take over almost every aspect of his life and destroyed almost any ability he has to make normal and meaningful connections with people. The New York setting is key to the movie as McQueen seems to be keenly interested in filming the city in his own unique way which emphasizes how it can be rather isolating if you let it. The film is mostly remembered for Michael Fassbender’s fearless performance and it came out right when it seemed like he was about to become a major movie star. That didn’t really end up happening this decade partly because he was a bit too drawn to edgy material like this and partly because some of his attempts to crossover to the mainstream were misguided (looking at you Assassin’s Creed). This was probably his finest performance of the decade and while McQueen’s other work slightly overshadow it, it shouldn’t be forgotten.
75. Contagion
 |
|
One of the decade’s most underappreciated films, and by quite a bit, is Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical disaster film Contagion, which was a sort of procedural outlining what it would be like if a pandemic broke out and we weren’t able to contain it. The film looks at this “what if” scenario from numerous perspectives including patient zero, ordinary people trying to survive, epidemiologists, and profiteers who make the situation worse. Scott Z. Burns clearly did a lot of research when he was writing the film’s screenplay as the film really feels like it knows a lot about how the CDC and similar organization work and it seems to have some very well informed speculations about what a worst case scenario for something like this would be like. The film’s third act, in which the contagion has really spread and society is starting to break down in some disturbingly plausible ways, is chilling in ways that a Roland Emmerich disaster film could never dream of being. There is also something kind of progressive and Obama-era hopeful in the film’s outlook as it’s a movie that ultimately does have faith in science and in government’s ability to solve big problems like this. The final movie ended up being a little too small for general audiences and too big for critics to champion as they tend to like Soderbergh better when he’s doing really small experiments. It didn’t flop but it came and went from theaters in a way without making the impact that it deserved to make.
74. Mr. Turner
 |
|
The great British filmmaker Mike Leigh only made three movies this decade, but two of them were among the largest budgeted films of his career. He started off the decade with Another Year, which got a lot of acclaim at Cannes but which I found kind of dull, and he ended the decade with Peterloo, which was very poorly received at festivals but which I found interesting. The one film of his this decade for which I am largely in line with the consensus on is his mid-decade triumph Mr. Turner, which looked at the life and times of J.M.W. Turner, a nineteenth century landscape painter that I was not familiar with before the film and who didn’t exactly have a dramatic life but who ended up fascinating me nonetheless. Leigh doesn’t have a pat “take” on Turner’s life but instead lets it play out in all its many contradictions. The dude can be a complete asshole at times but then he’ll surprise you here and there and the movie feels less like an attempt to glorify or damn him so much as an attempt to understand him. I also suspect that Mike Leigh might have seen some of himself in Turner, at least in his artistic career. Like Turner, Leigh is a guy who takes something of a working class approach to art (despite probably having plenty of personal wealth) and there’s a certain lack of glamor to his life as a painter. But beyond that the film is just really beautiful to look at; the cinematography is lush and the sets are grand, and there are a lot of interesting side characters as well.
73. No
 |
|
The 2010s have been a great decade for the previously nascent Chilean film industry and it’s in many ways been the director Pablo Larraín leading the charge. Larraín’s work has had a pretty wide range of tones and one of his more fun and audience pleasing films was his 2012 effort titled simply No. The film revolves around the 1988 plebiscite which removed the dictatorial Pinochet regime from power and it’s told from the perspective of the advertising agency which managed to spearhead the “vote no” movement simply by creating a catchy jingle for the cause. Gael García Bernal stars as the advertiser behind it all and he makes for a compelling starpower at the center of the film. All of this sounds very populist, almost Argo-like, and there is a bit of that here but the film also has a fairly unconventional visual style in which it intentionally looks like it was shot on whatever video format news footage was being shot on in the late 80s. This both gives the film a unique look and some immediacy but also allows Larraín to splice in archival footage into the film somewhat seamlessly. The film acts as a very pleasant history lesson and would also serve as a quality gateway film for people who don’t normally watch slightly unconventional foreign films.
72. Uncut Gems
 |
|
One of the most promising voices in American cinema to debut during this decade was the filmmaking team of Josh and Benny Safdie, who made three straight gritty crime films that showcased various neighborhoods in New York in the second half of the decade. But while Heaven Knows What and Good Time both showed a lot of promise it wasn’t really until their most recent film Uncut Gems that everything really came together for them, at least in my eyes. Part of that might simply be that they’re working with a larger budget to work with but beyond that I think this is where they really found a central character that was really worthy of their treatment, someone who is all kinds of dysfunctional but who isn’t a complete tragedy like the protagonist of Heaven Knows What or a completely unlikable menace like the main character of Good Time. The protagonist here is a fuck up certainly, but he only really seems to hurt himself and the people who choose to associate with him despite several red flags, and this character is played by Adam Sandler of all people. It’s certainly not the first time that Sandler had done something outside of his usual shtick but it was a bit more naturalistic than the work he did in films like Punch Drunk Love and the like. Like their other films the movie really captures its setting and feels like it was made by people who know a thing or two about New York’s underground but on top of that it also works as a very exciting thriller where you’re just trying to keep up with its main character and his various ill-fated schemes.
71. A Ghost Story
 |
|
A Ghost Story is one of those movies that seems just ridiculous when you describe it. Simply calling it a movie where a man dies and has his ghost represented onscreen by a man with a sheet over his head sounds like pretentious nonsense, and that’s before getting into the pie scene. And yet this movie, for all its strangeness, simply works. Director David Lowery (a filmmaker who has been fairly inconsistent otherwise) manages to invent a film language for the movie which sort of make the experience of being a ghost haunting a house logical for an audience without having its main protagonist say a word. This is partly because the film has a somewhat uncanny ability to know exactly how much to stretch out each section of the movie before moving on to a new one and to make each new section seem different and surprising. It might not be the “best” movie of the decade but it’s certainly different from every other movie that got made in this decade or any other and the fact that it manages to pull it off as well as they do is really impressive.
70. Carol
 |
|
When Carol failed to earn a Best Picture nomination at the 2015 Oscars the media narrative around it was that this was evidence of the Academy being unwilling to award a film about a homosexual relationship which wasn’t tragic in nature. It was never a narrative which made much sense to me because to my eyes Carol is a movie that’s rather steeped in melancholy and repression and this is where it gains a lot of its power. The film is a portrait of two women who fall in love during a time when even straight sexuality was repressed as hell and they need to go to great lengths to keep their flirtations hidden in plain sight. The film is a period piece set in a sort of Mad Men 1950s but is based on a novel that was looking at then contemporary society rather than looking back at a more intolerant past and as such it makes this very much a relationship of its time rather than a modern lesbian romance placed in the middle of a different time to give it additional weight. Director Todd Haynes films the whole thing with a sort of icy detachment that emphasizes the distances that these two would need to overcome rather than trying to pump the whole thing up as a sort of destined romance that’s free of complications like the title character’s previous marriage and advanced age. It’s a mature film that doesn’t fit perfectly within the trends of current cinema but is nonetheless too strong to overlook.
69. Gone Girl
 |
|
David Fincher is a director who is in something of a predicament. Given that his mastery of technical filmmaking is central to his style he usually needs to work in something of a big budget Hollywood space but his style isn’t really suited to making superhero fantasy type things and he also doesn’t write his own movies like the Christopher Nolans of the world so he often has to find other ways to get Hollywood to fund his darker visions of humanity. In the early 2010s he came to the conclusion that the way to do this was to make big screen adaptations of bestselling thriller novels with buzzy themes about gender at their center. That is how we got Gone Girl, an adaptation of the Gillian Flynn novel of the same name which didn’t quite exploit Fincher’s visual style at the level that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo did but made up for it by simple virtue of the fact that it was working with better source material. Flynn’s book is an effective mystery but also a blisteringly dark satire of modern relationships and marriage mores and this is carried over to the film pretty effectively as is its take on the ways that the media flocks to sensationalistic stories and jumps to easy conclusions regardless of the evidence on the ground. Few movies this decade seemed as perfectly relevant tapped into the zeitgeist as this one without explicitly being about a social issue and it managed to do this while still being a really good and well-acted potboiler.
68. To the Wonder
 |
|
The 2010s were the decade where, for better or worse, Terrence Malick stopped keeping us waiting. Ever since the release of The Tree of Life he actually started putting out movies at more of a normal clip than his previous one movie per decade pace. But that wasn’t an entirely good thing as there were many people who quickly stopped jiving with him as he put out movie after movie and by the end of the decade I had kind of turned on him as well but I was still with him through his 2013 film To the Wonder. This film in many ways feels like a companion piece to The Tree of Life in that it applies Malick’s ethereal style to more or less ordinary lives but this time it’s set entirely in contemporary times and it never quite feels the need to do anything as “out there” as connecting its story with the dawn of the universe. The other big difference is that this is primarily looking at the lives of adults, specifically young adults and in this sense feels like kind of the second act that The Tree of Life didn’t really have. The film features Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko as passionate but somewhat troubled lovers living in Oklahoma and Malick manages to shoot both the lovers and the landscape exquisitely. The movie doesn’t have a super firm plot but it does have a tangible emotional arc and you do become attached to these characters even without the usual amount of expository dialogue.
67. Us
 |
|
Among the most unpopular opinions I’ve had in the 2010s was that the movie Get Out was not the major achievement people seemed to think it was. As a horror movie I found it inert and as a political statement I found it obvious and that as a political statement it came about five years too late given that it was very much an artifact of the Obama era that came out in the first year to the Trump presidency. But Jordan Peele’s follow-up film Us worked a whole lot better for me. As a pure horror experience the film is significantly more intense than Peele’s earlier film while also feeling nicely unique from the rest of the decade’s horror cinema. What feels like a home invasion movie at first soon turns into a larger apocalyptic vision with this weird concept about a world being invaded by an army of doppelgangers that live underground, which makes no sense if you stop to think about it in any detail but it still just works in part because the movie almost operates on a certain Argento-esque nightmare logic by that point. The film is also most definitely making a political statement even if what that statement is isn’t necessarily super clear, but in a way that I like. Political horror movies are at their best when they give you a whole lot to chew on but leave a lot open to interpretation and debate, which is certainly the case with this one.
66. The Square
 |
|
General consensus is that Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure is one of the decade’s best films, but personally I think I prefer his follow-up, The Square. The film is a satire about the world of modern art, which is admittedly kind of an easy target. Certainly there are the expected scenes like the one where a janitor vacuums up a work of art believing it to simply be a mess on the floor, but there bigger point here isn’t to mock the art or artists but to sort of rib the wealthy class of people who control the museums and galleries. Specifically it’s about laying low its protagonist, a guy who ostensibly seems like a sort of ideal European intellectual rich guy but who over the course of the movie proves to be less smart and less able to live up to his ideals than he thinks. At the center is a piece of modern art called “The Square,” in which a square is drawn in the center of the floor with a plaque next to it which reads “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations;” the implication of course being that outside of the square the world is cruel and that the square is probably only “safe” because it’s in the middle of a high class museum with hired security. But the main guy certainly doesn’t get that this is a critique of upper class bubbles and when he finds himself interacting with the real world he does it with the utmost privilege based obliviousness. Ultimately this is probably the thing that makes me relate to this more than Force Majeure: I don’t really worry too much about being proven to be less brave than I think I am, but I’m definitely scared shitless about being found to be less smart than I think I am.
65. La La Land
 |
|
In the late January of 2017 Saturday Night Live put out a sketch in which Aziz Ansari is being interrogated for having committed the crime of having disliked the movie La La Land, with the implication being that that movie had overbearing fans. The irony to this is that the tides turned pretty heavily against La La Land within the discourse and by the time it lost Best Picture at the Oscars in memorable fashion it had sort of become the underdog. Today one would get a lot more side eye for saying you disliked Ansari’s movie of choice in that sketch: Moonlight. But La La Land has a lot more going for it than some of its initial critics gave it credit for. Filmmakers have been trying to find ways to make musicals blend with modern cinematic techniques for decades with more failures than successes so simply making a successful musical within a modern and somewhat realistic milieu is probably a pretty strong accomplishment in and of itself. Damien Chazelle mostly accomplishes this by turning away from the bubbly tone that we usually associate with Hollywood musicals and instead leans into the story’s melancholy while making the songs more like an extension of the film’s score than like separate show tunes. The film also makes the choice to tell a very simple story about love and ambition at its center which can be elevated through the film’s songs and through Chazelle’s control over tone. Some of the key set pieces in this thing like the opening and the Griffith Observatory sequence just look amazing and watching the film is just a perfect sensory experience even if it doesn’t necessarily leave you with a ton to chew on after the fact.
64. Poetry
 |
|
In the last fifteen years South Korean cinema has come to major international prominence largely on the strength of some creative but accessible genre films but those are far from the only movies being produced there and Lee Chang-dong is among the leading voices of slower and more philosophical filmmaking in that country. His 2010 film Poetry is a pretty deep character study but a character study about a person who doesn’t spend a whole lot of time articulating her feelings openly in part because they’re a little too strong and deeply felt to simply articulate. The film concerns an old woman who has custody over a grandson who is the worst kind of teenager. He is wildly disrespectful of her, is seemingly going nowhere in life, and the grandmother eventually comes to learn that he and his awful friends did some terrible things to a girl who went on to kill herself. On top of that the woman has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and likely won’t have full control of her mind for too much longer. It’s a movie about someone who has come to realize that much of what she could have wanted out of life has been a failure; her family is a mess and she feels indirectly responsible for someone’s death. So the movie is about coming to terms with life’s disappointments and trying to find some meaning with your last years even if you can’t really change the world.
63. First Reformed
 |
|
In 2017 Paul Schrader was about as washed up as a director could possibly be. He had just gotten done making two direct-to-VOD Nicholas Cage movies and a strange and largely unwatched movie with Lindsey Lohan, and even before those low points he had spent the previous decade mostly making unwatched arthouse movies and a weird unreleased Exorcist prequel. So it was a surprise to say the least when he made a major comeback in the form of First Reformed, a film that was not only good but one of its year’s best. It is of course perhaps worth being a little suspicious about Schrader’s accomplishment because he is sort of using cheat codes to help gain the affection of critics. His film is chock to the brim with references to classics of world cinema like Diary of a Country Priest and Winter Light and it deals with some of the weighty themes of faith and isolation that made Schrader famous to begin with. It does, however, find ways to modernize a lot of what it repurposes like when it replaces Winter Light’s themes of nuclear age fears with worries about climate change. It’s a movie so strong and so appealing to its target audience that you have to wonder what drove Schrader to make so much schlock in the years leading up to it and to hope that there’s still time left for him to make more like it going forward.
62. Selma
 |
|
A lot of people have complained that Martin Luther King has fallen victim to a certain “Santa Clausification,” meaning that the culture has turned someone who was a radical protest leader into this harmless saintly figure. With her movie Selma I don’t think Ava DuVernay sought to completely overturn how people envision the civil rights leader but she certainly did seek to show exactly the amount of hard work he needed to do on the ground. Beyond that she used a single moment in history to really illustrate what goes into grassroots organizing. Like Spielberg’s Lincoln this isn’t really a biopic so much as a sprawling ensemble film showing every element of work that went into a moment that often gets painted as an individual achievement in history books. The film looks at the marches in Selma from the top to the bottom with the perspective of everyone from the president to the local protesters on the ground getting some representation in the film and despite that DuVernay manages to make the film manages to make these procedural elements consistently exciting, allowing the film to almost play out more like a thriller than a drama. This is in many ways what sets the film apart from the anodyne historical films that usually get shown in high schools and what makes this a much more challenging balancing act than it might seem at first glance.
61. 20th Century Women
 |
|
It’s kind of hard to explain what makes 20th Century Women such a great film and it might be because it’s a movie that feels on one hand very unique but not necessarily “weird.” The film is set in the late 1970s, which isn’t a time we see on film all that often and writer/director Mike Mills films the era in a fashion that’s down to earth, closer to what life then must have really felt like in its specific Santa Barbra setting, rather than trying to highlight every cultural touchstone of the decade. Mills is able to talk about this time and place with such specificity because the film is more or less autobiographical, which would normally be a turn off for me as I have something of a distaste for the “author writes about his adolescence” genre, but this is a bit different because this isn’t the work of a director in his twenties who’s writing about himself because that’s all he knows. Instead it’s the work of a fifty year old veteran filmmaker who has some real perspective on his past and while the point of view character is indeed a stand-in for himself it ends up being (as the title suggests) the various females in his life who he chooses to focus on. Specifically he focuses on his mother, the platonic friend he has a crush on, and the punk rock lady who’s a border in his mother’s house. These women are excellently portrayed by Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, and Greta Gerwig and each of them seem represents different generational approaches to femininity that were co-existing in 1979. The film doesn’t really have a major conflict exactly, it’s kind of a hangout movie but with more of a family dynamic, but a strong one.
60. Silence
 |
|
When I saw Silence back in early 2017 I knew it was something special and important but I wasn’t sure I was quite equipped to fully assess it on a first viewing… and I haven’t gotten around to seeing it again since then so I guess the jury is still kind of out. But there’s still way too much good stuff here to ignore. The film was a longtime passion project for Martin Scorsese which he finally got to make after the success of The Wolf of Wall Street and as happy as I am that he was able to get the funding for it I can’t imagine how any of his investors thought this would turn them a profit because the movie is not remotely commercial. This is a meditative film about deep spiritual anguish focused on a pair of 16th Century Portuguese priests who sneak into Japan in order to spread Christianity there despite that being banned by the isolationist regime that’s in place. The film focuses on one of these priests in particular and really digs into his trying to resolve the suffering he sees around him with his religious convictions. I’m not so sure that Andrew Garfield (an actor I have never really warmed to) is the best person to convey all of this and I would have liked a little more of the Japanese perspective on all this represented in the movie, but looked at strictly on the level the movies is supposed to be taken it is making some pretty fascinating theological arguments with the film form and is an important entry in the Scorsese filmography.
59. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
 |
|
The 2010s were the decade when the AIDS crisis really went from being a current events story to being a historical event to look back on. Hollywood responded to this by making the turgid Oscar bait Dallas Buyers Club but the French filmmaker Robin Campillo drew on his own past as an ACT UP protester to make BPM (Beats per Minute), a film that takes an on the ground look at an activist cell who was at ground zero of the epidemic. Campillo had previously triumphed as one of the screenwriters of the 2008 film The Class (Entre les murs), which gained power by letting the camera sit back and watch as a group of students debate out various points with their teacher and this directorial effort takes a similar approach by almost making it seem like the camera is a fly on the wall as the various activists debate amongst themselves what they stand for and what they want to do. It also follows the activists out into the field as they engage in their protests, some of which are a little debatable in how far they go. Then as the film goes on it starts to be more about the personal lives of these activists and how they deal with their own illnesses and their likely fates at a time when there was no reliable treatment for it. Sections of the movie work better than others, but as portraits of the ACT UP era go this is one of the best to come along since the time itself.
58. The Babadook
 |
|
The second half of the 2010s saw a sudden insurgence of “elevated horror” movies and while The Babadook wasn’t my favorite of these movies it does seem to be the first one to have arrived and sort of foretold the trend even if it may not have directly caused it. The film also foretold another major theme within late 2010s culture: an increased focus on everyday mental health and depression. The film starts as an empathetic look at a single mother’s struggles to raise an autistic kid while mourning the death of her husband but then adds an element of supernatural horror that ends up being a metaphor for her own internalized struggles. But even if you don’t get too deep into the subtext there’s some pretty innovative horror stuff going on here. The film ekes some pretty effective chills out of something as simple as showing the inside of a rather creepy pop-up book and there’s a bit with silent movie imagery that really stands out. It was a movie I had somewhat under-estimated when it first came out. It came amidst the post-Paranormal Activity glut of movies about haunted houses and I was prone to look at just about any movie involving a haunting with a bit of a side-eye, but removed from that the movie’s obvious creativity shines and it’s rightly become something of a classic horror movie of the era.
57. Silver Linings Playbook
 |
|
There are a lot of movies that gain a lot by being in the thick of award season and bartering in prestige but I also think that sort of thing can backfire at times and I think something like that happened with David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which was being sold as some sort of deep probing look at mental illness when it is actually a romantic comedy, and probably the best romantic comedy of the 21st Century. The film is part of a series of films that David O Russell made in the 2010s which were considered something of a comeback for the director after he spent the previous decade only making a single completed film and earning something of a reputation for volatility. This new cycle of films from him focused on eccentric working class families in East Coast cities and Silver Linings Playbook was the most successful of them. It focused primarily on a recently divorced Philadelphia man who has come to learn that he suffers from bi-polar disorder and is trying to rebuild his life again. There’s a certain sadness buried in that setup but the movie is never dower and is in fact very funny for much of its running time. The whole family at the center of the film has all sorts of amusing habits and when Jennifer Lawrence enters the film it starts to turn into become something of an unusual romance. It’s a film that fits the form of the romcom without indulging the clichés of what that genre had become and being made with much more thought and skill than what we’re used to from such films and when it gets to the feel good ending it genuinely feels earned.
56. Nymphomaniac
 |
|
Lars Von Trier’s films are often judged in terms of their provocations rather than their filmmaking but after his 2011 film Melancholia got a more straightforwardly positive reception he must have been left with some pent up need to push buttons because his follow-up was 241 minutes of incitement. Though split into two films upon release for commercial purposes this is pretty clearly a single movie which tells a sort of shaggy dog story about the life of a sexually promiscuous woman. Despite the running time and the graphic sex scenes and the general political incorrectness of the whole thing this is actually one of Von Trier’s lighter and more accessible movies and there’s a certain looseness to the whole thing with Von Trier happily moving the story in all sorts of different directions. It’s like the White Album of Lars Von Trier movies. The film features Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin (in her debut performance) as the protagonist at different stages of her life and both give rather fearless performances. Different celebrities come into and out of the woman’s life like Shia LaBeouf and Christian Slater and the film gets a certain charge out of the fact that Von Trier has managed to get such people involved in his wacky vision and certain stand-out episodes include a tryst with a strange sexual game on a train, a sexaholics anonymous meeting that goes awry, and a scene involving Uma Thurman which is possibly the most outrageous exercises in awkwardness ever filmed. All of this is strung together with a framing story in which Gainsbourg tells all of this to a character played by Stellan Skarsgård who tries to intellectualize her various escapades in ways that are interesting while kind of hilariously missing the point. It’s a wild fun ride of a movie, albeit one made for people who are in touch with a very specific sensibility.
55. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
 |
|
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a great movie to watch but a hard movie to talk about. Ostensibly it’s just a movie about a group of investigators bringing a homicide suspect out to the Anatolian steppes in search of a body, but talking about the movie entirely in narrative terms kind of misses the point. This is a movie about setting a very specific mood in the way it strings together beautiful and perfectly composed shots of Anatolia at night combined with a humanistic interest in the various people involved with the case. There’s something very Tarkovsky-esque about the shots that Ceylan gets on this landscape and the emotions they elicit. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and really captures the mood of what the countryside is like at night. I don’t want to make this sound completely plotless though, there is a narrative here and it does come to a bit of a head late in the film in the sort of “morning after” segment in the town, which manages to still seem to be of one with the film that came before despite being removed from the scenery that defined so much of the rest of the film. This was my entry point into Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema and I wish I has seen it in theaters rather than at home, which probably would have really skyrocketed it up this list, but it’s a movie he had clearly been building toward in his career and he’s taken it as a launching pad from there.
54. Annihilation
 |
|
What a weird thing Annihilation is. A movie that was made by a major studio and which received a wide release (in America anyway) but which seems to by and large function as a modernized tribute to an early 70s Soviet art film. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is the obvious reference point that any film literate view would go to when viewing the film as both films deal with an isolated and mysterious “zones” where the normal laws of nature are subverted, but Annihilation is a bit less esoteric than that movie and isn’t above adding some creature elements that almost resemble John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is not, however, simply a watered down Hollywood take on a classic film’s formula as it plays things a bit more smart than that. The exact meaning of the film is fascinatingly vague, but it certainly deals in the determination of the individual as well as the rather flawed means by which humanity tends to respond to problems and threats, but you don’t need to dig that deeply in order to enjoy the film. The film’s visual inventiveness is plainly obvious as “the shimmer” produces all kinds of science fiction oddities and then there’s the film’s very trippy finale which is simply one of the best set-pieces of the decade. This is a science fiction movie that critics are going to be puzzling over for a very long time and I certainly hope it gains more and more of a cult following as time passes.
53. Amour
 |
|
Michael Haneke is obviously one of the living titans of world cinema but the 2010s have been kind of a lean decade for him. He’s only made two films during that span and only one of them was really successful but it was quite a success indeed. Haneke is known for making brainy and provocative films that seek to make strong but somewhat coded messages about modern society and politics, and that’s basically true of his 2012 film Amour as well but the story at its center is a lot more emotional even if it’s being depicted through Haneke’s unflinchingly cold gaze. The film concerns an elderly couple played by French screen legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva who are near the end of their lives and are given one last test when the wife suffers a stroke and begins to deteriorate physically and mentally. Watching this woman at her lowest point and seeing her husband desperately trying to help her is obviously not the most pleasant viewing but there’s a degree of empathy that you don’t necessarily get from some of Haneke’s other films and it probably does say something that the film got a Best Picture nomination from a timid film Academy that likely wouldn’t want much of anything to do with Haneke’s other movies but for whatever reason this movie managed to have crossover appeal despite doing nothing to compromise Haneke’s integrity.
52. Lincoln
 |
|
In the wider film world a movie like Lincoln certainly looks like an “overdog” if you will. On paper everything about a massive Steven Spielberg-directed biopic of an American icon starring Daniel Day-Lewis just screams of Academy wooing bloat that needs to get put down a peg, and yet I find Lincoln to actually be one of the decade’s most tragically under-appreciated films. In some ways I feel like the movie was burdened with a bad title because this really isn’t the Abraham Lincoln biopic that it advertises itself as: it’s set over a short period of time and focuses on a single political event that he was involved in, the passage of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery. Lincoln isn’t really the central character either, he’s part of a rather large ensemble that’s filled with many of today’s greatest actors, all of them reciting some really great dialogue written by the great playwright Tony Kushner and focused on the many great divisions that have existed in America since time immemorial. In fact I think this film is in many ways making a very contemporary political statement in that I think it’s something of a stealth defense of Obama from attacks on the left in the way it seeks to show that even our greatest political figures needed to occasionally get their hands dirty and make compromises in order to make good things happen and that judgement by purity test often isn’t warranted.
51. Mad Max: Fury Road
 |
|
As franchise obsessed as Hollywood is and always has been there was one franchise that really seemed dead it was Mad Max, which is a series that hadn’t had a new installment since before I was born despite having had a pretty noticeable effect on culture. This was probably because the series had long been associated with Mel Gibson and he had moved on to bigger things and because the original films were kind of in a gray zone between cult success and actual mainstream success. So suffice it to say I did not expect a reboot of the franchise would lead to one of the decade’s most critically acclaimed films and I certainly didn’t think that the person to do it would be the franchise’s original creator George Miller, who had kept kind of a low profile through much of the 90s and 2000s. Yet somehow everything came together and a rather amazing action movie was the result. The film had exciting action, some amazing visuals, and even a surprisingly large amount of political relevance. I loved the movie but I never quite went as all in on it as some critics and I think that’s largely because I think Mad Max himself is kind of devoid of personality and is almost a non-entity in his own movie despite seemingly being the film’s point of view character. That’s kind of a problem I had with the old movies in this franchise too but it’s a little more glaring here when everything else is so amazing. It’s still an amazing movie despite that Achilles heel and certainly belongs on any list of the best movies of the decade even if it’s a little lower on my list than it would be on some peoples’.
50. Dunkirk
 |
|
Of the four films Christopher Nolan made this decade Dunkirk would seem to be the least ambitious insomuch as it isn’t trying to dive into a dream world, send anyone on a mission across lightyears to save humanity, or cap off a legendary trilogy by invoking the French Revolution. And yet despite essentially being a recitation of history Dunkirk is a movie that’s more than worthy of Nolan’s skills and in many ways shows just as much ingenuity in its creation. The decision tell the three stories across three different periods of time while still ultimately having them line up, is quite original, but it employs the trick in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself and isn’t necessarily going to be the first thing that comes to mind when people think of the movie. The thing that does come to mind first is Nolan’s rigor in building out the Dunkirk evacuation with as many real people, real boats, and real planes as possible. It’s also notable for its ability to capture the all too real human story of desperation that went on at Dunkirk. When the movie came out I had this big elaborate theory about how it was a movie that perfectly matched the feeling of defeat mixed with determination to come back and win that the world was feeling after the double whammy of Brexit and Trump’s election, and while I acknowledge that this is very unlikely to have been intentional I still basically stand by the reading. It’s a movie that’s both meticulously cerebral and completely intense.
49. Mustang
 |
|
In 2016 director Deniz Gamze Ergüven released her sophomore effort, Kings, which is a film I have not seen but it certainly looks wretched. That Halle Berry/Daniel Craig Rodney King Riots film got a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and is perhaps one of this decades biggest disappointments given that Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang was one of the most promising first features of the year. That film was set in Turkey, the country she emigrated from to France when she was young and in some ways the film feels like a sort of worst case scenario of what might have happened to her if her parents hadn’t moved. In it we watch five sisters who appear to have been orphaned and raised by their more conservative relatives and are basically forbidden from leaving the house and are being groomed to be married off at a relatively young age without any other option. It’s a situation that bears some similarities to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides but here it feels more like a social critique than a thought experiment. Despite the fairly grim situation the film is actually rather rich with life and really brings the spirit of these girls alive. The title is a sort of metaphor for the vibrancy of the characters which can’t be contained by even these awful conditions. Hopefully Ergüven gets it together for film number three because if her debut is any indication there’s a lot of potential in her.
48. Leviathan
 |
|
Andrey Zvyagintsev has only made five movies over the course of a nearly twenty-year career but despite that, and despite the fact that I have no idea how to pronounce his name, he’s pretty clearly the most important filmmaker to come out of Russia and Leviathan is probably the most important film of his career. The film is about a sort of battle of wills between a corrupt mayor that wants to seize a man’s home through a sort of eminent domain and the guy who refuses to sell and stands up to him. That’s the kind of set-up that could easily lend itself to a sort of cheesy movie about the little man overcoming adversity, but there’s none of that here. Instead the movie plays out like a sort of rumination on the biblical Book of Job with a man having his life getting worse and worse from his strict adherence to principals, but here our protagonist isn’t being tested by god (the movie is deeply anti-clerical) but by societal corruption in the form of both the government and the church. It’s a deeply cynical movie in which ordinary people are basically powerless when standing up to corruption and while it sympathizes with the guy on the receiving end of this trauma it doesn’t necessarily valorize him either. That’s what the movie is doing on a macro level anyway, but while you’re watching it the film doesn’t play like an on-the-nose parable, a lot of it actually concerns the protagonist’s day-to-day life and the breakdown of his family. It’s a dense movie with a lot going on in it and it’s not always a “fun” movie to watch, but it’s a deeply subversive movie that does not pull its punches.
47. Clouds of Sils-Maria
 |
|
The 2010s proved to be a very fruitful decade for the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. He started the decade with the energetic and broadly scoped Carlos the Jackal miniseries Carlos (which is ineligible for this list) and then went on to explore his 60s youth but the two films that are most likely to be remembered are a pair of English language efforts he made with Kristen Stewart and particularly this one which focuses in on such themes as aging, modern filmmaking, and the line between acting and reality. Stewart plays an assistant to a middle aged actress played Juliette Binoche who has just been asked to star in a revival of a play that made her famous but to take on an older role rather than reprise the role she originated, which puts her in a rather wistful mood. The two spend much of their time traveling in scenic areas of Switzerland, including the titular valley where clouds snake through canyons, which is the perfect setting for this rather mysterious movie where reality seems somewhat in flux. The highlight of the film are the sequences where Stewart and Binoche are practicing lines and it becomes increasingly unclear whether they’re really just practicing or whether they’re actually talking to one another. It’s not a movie that’s trying to knock you over with its brilliance but it manages to be an interesting little puzzle with a rather hypnotic tone.
46. Black Swan
 |
|
When Black Swan opened it seemed like something of a companion piece to Darren Aronofsky’s previous film The Wrestler given that both films were about people with very physical jobs at different ends of the show business sophistication spectrum. While there are certainly some similarities between the two Black Swan is also different in key ways and is in many ways a more characteristically Aronofsky freak-out of a movie. Drawing heavily on Roman Polanski, Satoshi Kon, and Powell and Pressburger the film taps into the cinematic language of paranoia in order to put you in the head of a young ballerina as she slowly loses her mind over the course of the film. Aronofsky utilized 16mm film stock for the movie and used a slightly less showy version of the aggressive editing style he developed for Requiem for a Dream in order to keep audiences on edge as they tried to determine what was real and what wasn’t in the film. Despite all that the movie proved to be a hundred million dollar hit at the box office and was embraced by the Academy who gave Natalie Portman a Best Actress Oscar for her bravura work. It’s really kind of crazy how well the movie performed with the mainstream given how weird it is. Cinematic descents into madness don’t generally perform well to the masses and I don’t know that there was anything in the zeitgeist of late 2010 to explain the film’s success beyond the fact that a whole lot of people were just reallyh impressed by the way Aronofsky manages to paint this woman’s mindset.
45. Roma
 |
|
In 2018 a lot of pundits seemed to be really convinced that Roma, a Spanish language black and white movie that didn’t have a traditional narrative arc, would win Best Picture at the Oscars. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but the very fact that people thought such an overtly “arty” winning that award says something about its power and quality. Roma is an autobiographical film insomuch as it’s about the memories of the writer/director’s youth but rather than narcissistically focusing on himself Alfonso Cuarón opted to instead speculate about the life of someone else from his childhood: the housekeeper who lived his upper middle class home. This social realism is pretty far removed from a blockbuster like Gravity and even from a dystopian future vision like Children of Men, but Cuarón treats this production with the same level of care and the same interest in visual grandeur. Cuarón meticulously re-creates early 1970s Mexico City and uses a somewhat unconventional film grammar that mirrors a sort of hazy memory and employs a lot of impressively long shots including a rather bravura bit toward the end where he manages to film amongst ocean waves. The film’s audio soundscape is also innovative in that it uses no music and really surrounds the audience with ambient sound. At the film’s crescendo personal history combines with national history in a major way which is quietly audacious. I do sort of get why it was only going to get so far with the likes of the Academy, it’s in some ways an easier movie to respect than like, but if it had won that would have been pretty sweet.
44. The Past
 |
|
There are few tasks as thankless as trying to make the follow-up to an almost universally beloved film that put your name on the map in a big way. The novelty of discovery is gone and almost anything you make will almost certainly be written off as a sophomore slump even if what you make is still better than most of the other films in the marketplace. Such was the situation that the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi faced in making a follow-up to his Academy Award winning film A Seperation, a movie that is loved by pretty much everyone who’s seen it and which easily crossed all sorts of cultural lines to become an Oscar winning international phenomenon. That was always going to be a tough act to follow, and his 2013 film The Past is indeed a lesser work, but it’s still pretty damn amazing. Divorce is once again a topic in the film but isn’t central to it and this time around he’s filming in Paris rather than Iran but a major character is an Iranian national who has traveled to France to finalize a divorce to his wife. I don’t want to get too much into the plot from there because this is a rather underseen film but suffice it to say that it’s another emotional scenario about people at cross purposes. It might be forever doomed to be the Magnificent Amerbsons to A Seperation’s Citizen Kane, but is that really such a terrible thing to be?
43. Embrace of the Serpent
 |
|
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent is, if nothing else, a movie that boldly refuses to take the easy way out when it comes to fulfilling its vision. It was shot in black and white, it done largely in tribal languages which would not be understood by any world audience without subtitles, it has a tricky structure that cuts between two time periods, and it ends with a spiritual/hallucinogenic trip rather than a conventional plot resolution. It’s a movie that laughs in the face of other movies’ compromises and excuses, is what I’m saying. They even shot the damn thing on 35mm, which could not have been easy given that the film is set in the Amazon rainforest. There were, however, good reasons for all of these decisions. The temporal structure allows audiences to see the lingering effects of colonialism and corporate exploitation, the linguistic challenges show respect for the cultures being depicted while showing the rainforest’s diversity, the black and white achieves a period feel while also forcing audiences to focus in on the story rather than get lost in the beautiful scenery, and the hallucination at the end… well I’m still trying to wrap my head around that part but the point is this is a movie with an uncompromising vision that is unlike much of anything else out there and is also a rather singular experience with some haunting imagery and ideas.
42. Beyond the Hills
 |
|
In the early 2000s you’d hear rumblings from festival circuits of interesting cinema coming out of Romania and the door was really blown off at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival when Cristian Mungiu won the Palm d’Or for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. It would take five years for Mungiu to follow up that success but when he finally came back he didn’t disappoint. Beyond the Hills is less explosive than his breakthrough, but it remains a really strong work just the same. The film is set in modern Romania and focuses on two women who grew up together in an orphanage, one would be adopted away to a home in Germany and the other eventually ended up in a convent. In the film the two reunite when the one who left visits that convent and what follows is a fairly long and at times rather intense film about these two severed souls coming together and the way that sort of drives one of them crazy and how the church responds to this. The film feels a bit different from other “Romanian New Wave” films in that the basic filmmaking language is a touch more conventional and less overtly focused on long shots but the focus on taking a stark look at societal issues remains. In the film’s third act it takes a dramatic turn which even flirts with the supernatural, which is definitely unusual for this movement but Mungiu steers it just right. It’s a movie that announced in a big way that the Romanian New Wave was likely to grow and change but that Mungiu was here to stay.
41. The Favourite
 |
|
Yorgos Lanthimos is plainly one of the most important filmmakers of the decade, but I don’t necessarily love everything he’s done. His first two English language films (The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer) were definitely interesting but they also kind of weirded me out. Something about the way that Lanthimos was handling dialogue in those movies was so isolating as to kind of keep me at arm’s length. Of course his movies are kind of supposed to keep audiences at arm’s length, they’re profoundly weird movies that are not meant to work for everyone. But then came The Favourite, a movie that somehow managed to be the perfect vehicle for Lanthimos to make something a bit more accessible without feeling like a sellout. This accessibility might partly be because Lanthimos didn’t write this one, but the way he directs the actors is still largely in keeping with his sensibilities. The movie is set in the very early 18th Century and depicts historical events that have not been depicted too often but the movie has a uniquely modern outlook and attitude in a lot of ways. The whole movie is a sort of Dangerous Liaisons riff where the characters are constantly backstabbing one another and the script is full of really biting insults and jabs. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz are deliciously able to inhabit the roles of the suiters sniping at one another for the queen’s affection and the movie also brought the actress Olivia Coleman, who had previously really faded into the background, into focus as a major talent and won her an Oscar. There’s kind of a long tradition of these sorts of ribald costume dramas and this movie brings that tradition into the 21st century perfectly.
40. Blue Valentine
 |
|
The 2010s have been a really strong decade for these movies that take a very close look at the messy realities of relationships between complicated people. This trend of anti-RomComs maybe got their start with 2010’s Blue Valentine, a film that cuts between the promising start and sad end to a marriage between two people who clearly love each other deeply prove to just not be able to make it work. The film was made about four years after Ryan Gosling had established himself as a strong dramatic actor in the film Half Nelson and in many ways this solidified him as one of the go-to prestige actors of the decade and also solidified Michele Williams as someone who could in many ways do no wrong. Director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance really puts in the work to give these characters a backstory and build a realistic lower-middle-class life for them that feels more real than it would in other similar movies while still finding ways to give the whole thing a bit of that operatic oomph you want out of cinema.
39. Ida
 |
|
Intentionally making your movie take on the look and style of a bygone era of filmmaking is always a dicey proposition, one that can easily result in gimmickry and usually invites unflattering comparisons to past masterpieces. The inexplicable Best Picture winner The Artist is a perfect example of how doing that can quickly turn your movie into a quickly forgotten novelty. However, if your movie is good enough to bear the weight of that kind of borrowed style and you’re doing it for good reasons it can work. A perfect example of this is Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, which embodies the style of 1950s European cinema but rather than ape any one director’s style Pawlikowski establishes his own visual style within those technological confines. Telling the story of a nun in 1960s Poland who discovers that she was her parents had been murdered by the Nazis and that she was in fact of Jewish blood, a fact that leads her to much soul searching and considerations of her place in the world. The black and white cinematography by Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski is certainly intended to make the rural polish landscape look classical and rather drab but the film is quite beautiful just the same and Pawlikowski really makes good use of the top and bottom of the Academy Ratio framing he chose for the film. Despite its director being somewhat obscure at the time and the film having had limited festival exposure it managed to be quite the sleeper hit at the arthouse box office in 2014 and set up what appears to be a very high profile career for Pawlikowski.
38. The Irishman
 |
|
While it was in production The Irishman kind of felt like a project that was too good to be true. Scorsese making another gangster movie? And with De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci starring? There was no way that would turn out to be as good as it promised, but low and behold the movie did come out right at the end of the decade and it turned out to be quite the impressive achievement. The film is based on a biography/memoir/confession of a guy who claimed to have been a hitman for the Wilkes-Scranton mafia during the 50s, 60s, and 70s who asserted that he was the one who killed Jimmy Hoffa. There are some pretty good reasons to think that this claim is not very credible, but that’s not really the point of the film. The real goal here is for Scorsese to take a hard final look at the mafia genre that he had a hand in creating in its modern form and to make a final statement about it, and that statement it there to make it clear that the people in this world are truly damned. Where some of Scorsese’s other crime movies sort of reveled in the spoils of a life of crime before showing the damage caused by those lives, this one gets more to the point and really focuses in on how broken and miserable these people are left after making the life decisions they did. It’s more like the late portions of The Godfather Part II than the early parts of Goodfellas, but its consistently compelling in how it brings this story to the screen and remains riveting through its entire 209 minute runtime. It won’t be Scorsese’s last film, at least not unless there’s an unforeseen tragedy, but it easily could have been and it would have seemed more than fitting.
37. Eighth Grade
 |
|
When the (slightly over-rated) film Lady Bird came out actress Saoirse Ronan received several accolades for choosing not to use makeup to clear up some acne in order to better convey the realities of teenage bodily awkwardness. Eighth Grade is a movie that takes a look at that gesture and says “hold my beer.” Most teen movies like to make their protagonists look like underdogs within their schools, but the truth of the matter is that most of them actually seem to have plenty going for them. Eighth Grade is by contrast one of the only teen (well, tween) movies I can think of where the protagonist truly is an outcast within the school. The film is highly sympathetic about this but it also doesn’t take the easy way out by blaming the rest of the world for this girl’s plight. The popular kids in the school do not go out of their way to be mean to Kayla so much as they just kind of ignore her and frankly you can kind of understand why because Kayla is a bit all over the place. Her Youtube videos are an inarticulate jumble of advice given by someone who has no idea what she’s talking about. I wouldn’t be too interested in watching them, not as an adult and not when I was her age, and true to form they’re shown in the film to have some severely low view counts. People like to suggest that this is some highly modern film about what the internet is doing to “the kids” but if anything it just suggests that social media acts as little more than an extension of the same old middle school pains of trying to be noticed and reach out to people. Her in-person attempts at social interaction are also just painful to watch at times. That’s the thing about this movie, it’s so empathetic that it can be downright hard to watch as Kayla is put through the emotional ringer, but it’s a rewarding viewing experience just the same in order to get to the truth of what it’s like to be someone like this.
36. The Lighthouse
 |
|
Robert Eggers’ follow-up to The Witch was made with a higher budget and had the participation of some fairly high profile actors but rather than try to break into more commercial fare he doubled down on weirdness and put together a nightmare vision of a movie called The Lighthouse. The film featured only two characters with speaking roles and put them into a sort of hotbox where they proceeded to turn against one another and things grow increasingly surreal as the movie goes on. Among the film’s highlights are a series of dream/nightmare images involving things like demonic mermaids and staring Neptune figures and when things really start getting intense toward the end you start feeling like what you’re watching may in fact simply be a waking nightmare or some kind of purgatory for the Robert Patinson character. Like The Witch before it the film is written in a dialect of a different time, in this case in a sort of old New England brogue steeped in nautical slang that almost sounds like the type of speech you’d associate with pirates and Eggers gives Dafoe some staggeringly elaborate speeches he needs to read off with utter sincerity. The film was also shot in black and white and in an extremely narrow aspect ratio that emphasizes the verticality of the lighthouse in the film and this accentuates the film’s otherworldliness and a color version of the film is almost unthinkable once you’ve seen it. It’s the kind of sophomore effort that makes a pretty strong statement that the filmmaker is going to be here to stay and that he’s not afraid to let his freak flag fly.
35. Dogtooth
 |
|
If ever there was a piece of world cinema that really seemed to come out of nowhere it was probably Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (a film I’m counting as a 2010 release because of its late American release). The film was made by a then unknown director from a country that frankly hadn’t had many international hits in a while but which won the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes and managed to score a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the Oscars back when that category was usually dominated by middlebrow fare. The film focuses on a five person family which has isolated itself and where the parents have opted not to tell their children about the outside world and demand complete loyalty from them. It seems absurd on its face but you come to realize that what the film is essentially doing is creating in microcosm the kind of repression that exists in totalitarian societies like North Korea where people follow authority figures based on blind loyalty and the knowledge that dissent will be punished and knowledge of the outside world is not let in. But even ignoring that subtext this is a weird and audacious piece of filmmaking that introduced the world to Lanthimos’ style of presenting oddball behavior against sterile enviroments and it plays out with a great deal of energy and a boldness around taboo subject matter and a willingness to disturb without feeling like some kind of empty provocation.
34. The Revenant
 |
|
When it came out late in 2015 The Revenant was a surprisingly controversial movie among critics with many of them really coming out against the movie during that award season. Part of that was just an extension of the inexplicable animosity that certain critics seem to have against director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, which I’ve never understood. The other big complaint I maybe get a bit more now than I did at the time, namely that the movie isn’t particularly deep and probing. It’s revenge and survival story isn’t the most psychologically complex thing you’re likely to see and the villain played by Tom Hardy is a bit one-note. So I get why the film might not be someone’s favorite movie in the world, but to find it outright bad? Nah man, this is a movie that has Leonardo Di Caprio getting into a fight with a bear, so to not think that’s at least a little awesome is a bit hard to understand. There are actually a lot of amazing set-pieces in the movie like its opening battle sequence and the fight scene at the end, but what really stands out about the movie is simply its depiction of nature. It’s set on the frontier very early in the country’s history when the west (which is no longer the west) was still very wild and Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki opted to shoot the film using only natural lighting, which was almost certainly a huge challenge but the bigger point is that the movie is absolutely beautiful pretty much the whole way through. It’s kind of the ultimate wilderness adventure movie and it’s a captivating watch the whole way through.
33. Django Unchained
 |
|
Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s highest grossing movie to date. Pulp Fiction did slightly better domestically if you adjust for inflation, but by worldwide gross it isn’t even close; the movie managed to make no less than $425 million dollars around the world. That’s close to being franchise tentpole money. To put that in perspective it made more money than Captain America: The First Avenger, Solo: A Star Wars Story, X-Men: First Class, Cars 3, and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. And he managed to make a hit on that level not by compromising his usual style or making concessions to marketing, rather he managed to do it by making a two hour and forty-five-minute throwback western with a funny title which fearlessly tackles one of the most sensitive topics in all of American history. We’re used to Tarantino punching above his usual weight class at the box office so this doesn’t quite stand out like it maybe should, but it really is quite the achievement when you step back and think about it. It’s also a bit of an achievement that the movie did not really generate a whole lot of controversy. Spike Lee preemptively expressed distaste for it and there was some flinching about how many times the N-word was featured, but by and large the African American community seemed to be in favor of the movie and thought it did a good job at empowering its ex-slave protagonist against the Southern Aristocracy.
Personally, I thought and to some extent still think the movie was kind of stuck living in the shadow of Tarantino’s previous film Inglourious Basterds, which in many ways set the tone for this one and kind of had more going for it on a stylistic level and had a more complex narrative, but Django Unchained is in some ways the more purely entertaining movie of the two. Despite the dark subject matter Django Unchained is absolutely hilarious; I’m not sure that I’d call it a comedy but it’s certainly funnier than most of the studio comedies that have come out this decade. The film also does have Tarantino venturing out of his comfort zone a little by incorporating some newly commissioned music by modern artists and the period setting also requires him to stick more closely to referencing a single genre than the usual menagerie of references he usually brings to the table, but all the quotable lines and irreverent violence you expect form him is still there and he also manages to bring some unexpected elements to the table like references to German mythology and French literature. Only in a filmography as spotless as Tarantino’s could this be viewed as a minor work and only someone with his track record could have sold the film on as wide a scale as he did.
32. Phantom Thread
 |
|
By the midpoint of the decade Paul Thomas Anderson had created a towering reputation as a modern master and seemed like he could do no wrong. Then he made Inherent Vice, a movie that had several strong elements but which largely baffled me and which I frequently kind of forget exists. That movie was also something of a financial boondoggle and there was probably some pressure to come back with a more commercial film and while his follow-up would make more money at the box office and on a lower budget it was hardly a sellout. In fact the film’s basic milieu, the London fashion world of the 1950s, hardly seems like the stuff of cinematic gold Anderson does a great job of making the work at London fashion houses interesting to watch. But really the setting is just a unique little backdrop, what the movie is really about is its central relationship between the towering Reynolds Woodcock and a younger woman named Alma who he invites to be his assistant and muse. So it’s essentially a movie about a relationship with a clear power imbalance, which is tricky subject matter for a movie to have been covering in the year of #MeToo, but Anderson manages to walk that tightrope pretty effectively. Daniel Day-Lewis has said that this was his last role before retirement (so far he’s stuck to that, but we’ll see) and while this certainly isn’t the showiest or most difficult work he’s ever done it is very strong. But equally impressive is Vicky Krieps, an actress who had primarily worked quietly in Europe before this big break and manages to hold the screen with Day-Lewis seemingly without too much trouble. The relationship at the center of the film is kind of twisted, yet not to the point where it’s completely unrelatable and in many ways it’s this fascinating mystery for people to untangle for years to come.
31. Melancholia
 |
|
After he shocked pretty much everyone with his 2009 film Antichrist it wasn’t entirely clear what Lars Von Trier would be doing next. Was that a shock one-off or did it mark the beginning of a new era for the filmmaker? With his next film, Melancholia, it proved that he was back and that he intended to do more than simply shock and provoke. This is probably (definitely?) Von Trier’s most presentable and palatable movie of the decade, but that’s in relative terms. Like a lot of the films he’s made recently this is meant to be a reflection of his various mental health issues and this one was inspired by a bout of depression he suffered at one point. In particular it was inspired by a statement his psychologist made that people with depression react in crises differently from how normal people do and as such he created this wild film the borrows from Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice as well as classical poetry and painting to create a metaphorical scenario where the end of the world as we know it was occurring and the film’s depressed protagonist sort of felt fine about it. Well not fine exactly but she almost welcomes the end. That’s kind of a disturbing thought if you think about it, essentially a literalization of suicidal thought, but it’s done in a way that feels poetic rather than unpalatable. The whole movie is gorgeous, especially the beginning and end, which indulge in a certain super-slow-motion look that almost makes the characters into living statues in a moment and a lot of the more tense personal stuff in the middle is set against this crazy looking mansion. The final film is a beautifully acted and richly personal work that people will be analyzing for years to come.
30. Before Midnight
 |
|
Before Midnight has the distinction of being the only film of the 2010s that I placed on the top 100 films of all-time list I made five years ago, a list that otherwise disqualified films made after 2009 but it only seemed natural to include the entire “Before” trilogy on the list rather than sticking so stringently to the rules as to leave the film off. However a big part of why I was so willing to bend that rule five years ago is that it was plainly apparent almost right away that Before Midnight more than lived up to the two films that preceded it. In fact there are some fairly reasonable arguments to be made that the film is actually the best of the three in the trilogy. It’s a lot more grounded in reality than Before Sunrise and a lot more relatable than Before Sunset and while it more than delivers the kind of character portrait that fans of the series expect it isn’t inflexible in its adherence to franchise expectations and does some things noticeably different than the other films, most importantly it’s a movie where Celine and Jesse seem to be falling apart rather than coming together. There have certainly been a lot of movies made about couples having their relationships tested to the point of breaking, that was actually kind of a trend for the decade, but it was certainly the only one where audiences had already invested something like twenty years of interest in before being hit with that gut punch. Like all of these movies the film ends on a moment of ambiguity about the couple’s future and it remains to be determined if there’s a fourth film on the way at some point but as it stands this leaves us with one hell of a trilogy.
29. Burning
 |
|
There’s a scene about halfway through Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning where the film’s protagonist is casually watching a news broadcast which includes a speech by Donald Trump. What Trump was saying is incidental and this is never really brought up again but I don’t think the inclusion of this rather… controversial person was incidental either. The character watching this news report (who seems entirely apolitical) is a farmer of modest means and while the movie isn’t suggesting he’s sympathetic to this American politician but he does sort of fit the demographic of people who traditionally do fall in line with these right wing authoritarians and given that much of the movie deals with a sort of inferiority that he feels in the face of more urban, some would even say elite, characters I think there is something there. But the politics of the film’s protagonist is not front and center here so much as his psychology and his story is kick started when he reunites with a lady from his youth and after a brief hookup she goes on a trip and comes back with a man of mystery who she met while traveling and the protagonist finds himself in something of a freindzone. How he chooses to react to this will characterize much of the rest of the film but it’s not a straightforward question of social dynamics because there are additional mysteries to be found here over and above whether this female in question is a cocktease. This is very much a film about modern societal questions but one with shades of Vertigo and Last Year at Marienbad.
28. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
 |
|
When Quentin Tarantino set out to make his canonical ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood he was in kind of a low point. His previous film, The Hateful Eight, had not been a commercial success and his longtime distributor/financier was shut down amidst a major scandal which threatened to taint Tarantino as well. But despite all that he managed to write a script that would bring three major stars to the table which was enough for him to get Sony Pictures to take a risk on him and he managed to deliver them a hit while still working very much on his own terms. The film is set exactly fifty years before it was in its own unusual way sort of Quentin Tarantino’s Roma insomuch as its setting is a recreation of a world he remembered from his youth. Its subject matter by contrast is very much about his current adult headspace as it’s about aging actor and an aging stuntman; neither are definitively past their primes but they are certainly questioning how much longer they can maintain their place in the entertainment industry. Also the Manson family is lurking in the background, a malevolent force that in real life will disrupt the life of Rick Dalton’s next door neighbors’ lives and alter the psychological trajectory of Los Angeles as a whole, but not In Tarantino’s version of history as he gives the story one of his now trademark anachronistic twists but one that’s a bit different in tone and style than his last two. But to get too deep into the film’s themes is in some ways to ignore just how fun it can be as a simple hang-out movie about two guys coming to realize how important their friendship is and then going down a new path through the way they react to a crisis.
27. The Witch
 |
|
The 2010s were notable for being a pretty great decade for horror cinema and late in the decade we saw a sudden rise in critically lauded if unevenly received by the public indie horror films from daring filmmakers like Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster but the crown jewel of all of them is probably Robert Eggers’ incredibly accomplished debut film The Witch. Set in 17th century colonial New England, the film draws upon deep wells of American history and folklore in order to tell the story of a puritan family isolated in the woods and seemingly under siege by a witch in the woods and also by their own insecurities and paranoia. Horror movies are often made by people who are so singularly knowledgeable about past horror films and while that can have its benefits it is oddly refreshing when a filmmaker shows that he actually knows about things outside of cinema and has read a book or two. At the very least Eggers did all the necessary homework in construct this world and gives his characters what appear to be period accurate dialogue and mannerisms for extra authenticity. This goes a long way to put you in the mind of people who live lives that are rather foreign to modern viewers and the various cultural mores they’re dealing with. The film’s entire cast is magnificent both in their ability to handle the period detail and the breakdown of their family and as the film grows increasingly supernatural towards the end it knows just how far to go without seeming silly.
26. Moonlight
 |
|
It almost feels like if Moonlight didn’t exist the critical community would have had to invent it. It was exactly what so many people had been looking for: a film with all the aesthetic virtues of European and Asian art films, made by a person of color, which look at the life of a person with intersecting identity disadvantages in society but doing so in a way that’s still relatively accessible. Short of being directed by a woman or being in black and white the movie pretty much checked ever “critic bait” box imaginable and I do think some of the praise it got back in 2016 might have gotten a little bit over the top at a certain point, but it certainly deserved most of it. The film looks at the same character at three different ages, a high concept hook that probably would have been a more defining feature of a lesser movie, but here that feels more like a means to an end than a prominent gimmick. Moonlight is in many ways more defined by its style and the emotions that lie right beneath its surface. Stylistically the film draws on the longing present in the work of Wong Kar-Wai but the film has a real sadness to it rather than a mere melancholy in keeping with his younger and more confused protagonist. It’s a movie about a lonely and impoverished childhood but one with moments of joy here and there. The film also managed to assemble a pretty amazing cast which brought under-appreciated actors like Mahershala Ali, Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, and Jharrel Jerome to the forefront while showing new depths from more known actors like Naomie Harris and the R&B star Janelle Monáe. The film is one of the most improbable Best Picture winners ever, it feels way smaller and less populist than the movies that normally win that award, but something about it was so undeniable that even the most basic of Academy members couldn’t deny it.
25. The Tree of Life
 |
|
My experience with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life has been kind of complicated. Before the movie came out I was anticipating its release more than I had anticipated any other movie this decade. This was back when there were expected to be five plus year gaps between Malick movies and this film’s critical acclaim and evocative trailer had me expecting that it could very well be the best movie ever made. But when I saw the movie I found myself watching something that was a little harder to love even if it was impossible to not respect. I admired the film’s audacity and vision; the way it boldly folded the life of a modern family into the very creation of the cosmos was a pretty wild perspective, but as the film went on it did sort of start to test my patience. In its second half the film spends a lot of time just watching kids play outside and that did get a little tedious at a certain point. I also didn’t think the Sean Penn segments ever quite slotted into the rest of the film perfectly and I ultimately ended up leaving the film, not disappointed exactly, but kind of questioning if the overall film quite worked as wells as it felt like it should. But despite that I still had a tough time letting that get in the way of the aspects of the film that are extraordinary like Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning cinematography and the way he and Malick are able to make everyday life look so amazing. Repeat viewings have been kinder to the movie as I watch it kind of knowing what to expect and the positives have risen to the top for me, it’s a pretty damn fine accomplishment but I can’t quite consider it the “all-timer” that it can appear to be on certain levels.
24. The Handmaiden
 |
|
Deep into the 2010s Park Chan-Wook was starting to look like a filmmaker who was consistently interesting but who would always be living in the shadow of his breakthrough 2003 film Oldboy, but in 2016 he finally managed to top himself with his film The Handmaiden. The film was adapted from a contemporary novel which was set in Victorian England but the story was moved to 1930s Korea during the Japanese occupation and focuses on a pickpocket who comes to an aristocratic estate posing as a handmaiden as part of an elaborate grift that I will not reveal too much about. While the film’s surroundings suggest some kind of Downton Abbey-like story of class and manners, the actual movie is far more adventurous than that and ends up featuring some of the more extreme content you might expect from a maverick filmmaker like Park Chan-Wook. Emotionally the film is pretty scabrous wit characters ready to betray each other at a moment’s notice and with the Japanese occupation in the background you always know that there are life and death stakes to be found here. The film is also, quite sexy at times, managing to rather boldly fold some graphic erotica into his film in a way that doesn’t even seem exploitative. It’s a refreshing and smart piece of work that perfectly walks the line between prestige and genre provocation that grabs your interest early and holds on through its entire duration.
23. The Social Network
 |
|
2010’s The Social Network is a movie that has in some ways aged beautifully and in other ways seems rather dated already. To be sure the public’s relationship with Facebook has gone in all sorts of directions since the film came out which couldn’t possibly have been predicted and in that sense the film may prove to be an odd one to watch for future generations who may not quite understand what life was like before social media and also what life was like when social media still seemed kind of frivolous. The film is in fact a rather unflattering look at the origins of Facebook but Mark Zuckerberg’s shortcomings are rather personal and limited to the well-being of the people around him rather than society. Still, the film’s cultural relevance shouldn’t be diminished too much because even if it didn’t quite predict what influence Facebook would have on society it did still manage to understand that there was something of a clash of worlds coming between the world of Silicon Valley and the legacy economy and some of the swagger that would characterize bit tech.
On more of a filmmaking level, this certainly felt like something of a natural evolution of David Fincher’s filmmaking after he went digital with 2007’s Zodiac but in retrospect it could be said to have sort of set the template for what his filmmaking would be like for the rest of the decade, perhaps because it was his first collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and perhaps because it was in some ways his first truly successful foray into “respectable” subject matter. Granted he would go right back to making movies about serial killers soon after, perhaps because he realized he no longer had anything to prove, but the fact that he was able to bring to life a screenplay by eternal optimist Aaron Sorkin was certainly noteworthy. On top of all that the movie was rather uncanny in its ability to highlight new acting talent. Jesse Eisenberg was already established when the film was made and was something of an obvious casting choice but Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara were all nobodies before this movie and would go on to be some of the decade’s most successful young actors, and the Justin Timberlake stunt casting worked out kind of perfectly. Really the whole movie is something of a divine mix of flavors that work together surprisingly well and after ten years it has proven to be ever watchable and intriguing.
22. The Wolf of Wall Street
 |
|
In the 90s Martin Scorsese made a pair of gangster movies that have long been linked: Goodfellas and Casino. Both had the same pair of stars, both were based on true crime biographies of former gangsters, and both employed similar voice-over narrations but if you look closely at both that are in fact making two connected but separate statements about the state of organized crime. Goodfellas is about how organized crime lost its place in American society and Casino is about what they were replaced by: corporate America. About twenty years later Scorsese decided to revisit that “rise and fall” Goodfellas format to look in on what the inheritors of American criminal ingenuity have been doing with the place and the portrait he paints isn’t very pretty. At the center of the film is Jordan Belfort, a real life gangster who differs from Henry Hill and Sam Rothstein in that he isn’t a killer, but aside from that his criminality is far more obscene than anything that Scorsese’s previous gangsters could have dreamed of. Henry Hill may have been a cocaine addict (much to the disapproval of his superiors) but here Jordan Belfort engages in decadence of type that would make a Roman emperor blush, and Sam Rothstein may have overseen outlandish amounts of money but compared to Belfort’s ill-gotten gains he was a relative pauper. The question that the film asks without asking is if the audience thinks this is better or worse than the more conventional gangster stories he’s given us before. It’s not entirely clear where Scorsese falls on that question, but there is certainly a statement to be found in the fact that while Belfort does “fall” by the end of the film he doesn’t really fall as far as the gangsters in his previous films. Why would he? He’s not the last of a dying breed, in many ways he’s very much a made of the present.
21. 12 Years a Slave
 |
|
Every once in a while I’ll hear people say something like “there are too many movies about slavery,” which always baffles me because from where I sit there are hardly any films about slavery at all. In the twenty five years leading up to 12 Years a Slave American chattle slavery had only really been depicted in a select few Hollywood films in any kind of detail like Glory, Amistad, Beloved, and Django Unchained which would seem like a rather scant output given the institution’s extreme cruelty and incredible importance to American History. With 12 Years a Slave we were finally given a sort of Schindler’s List of slavery and we got it from Steve McQueen, the incredible emerging director who previously gave us Shame and Hunger. Like those movies this featured a notable performance from Michael Fassbender as a cruel slave owner but this was the first time that McQueen (a black British man) sought to tackle issues of race directly in a film. McQueeen was in full command of the medium from a technical perspective when he made the film and made a style of contrasting the harsh brutality of slavery with the pastoral beauty of the various delta plantations. He also managed to assemble a pretty impressive cast and while a couple of the celebrities he put into bit parts were a tad distracting he more than made up for it by more or less discovering Lupita Nyong’o and having her come out the gate with a ferocious Academy Award winning performance like this is very impressive. Beyond that there’s a pretty clear wisdom in the way McQueen presents slavery in the film; he shows different strains of slave ownership (be it “enlightened,” overtly cruel, male, female, transactional, personal) and shows why they’re equally culpable in the greatest crime in American, if not world, history.
20. Holy Motors
 |
|
“Pure Cinema” is a concept that gets thrown around a lot by film theorists which essentially means a focus on the aspects of cinema that are exclusively cinematic rather than those aspects that are borrowed from literature or the stage. Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is in some ways a perfect example of pure cinema in that it’s a movie that eschews any sort of traditional narrative and opts to act as a sort of exuberant celebration of everything that cinema can do. Various segments of the film are meant to be a showcase for different elements of filmmaking, whether it be acting, makeup, visual effects, music, etc, but it isn’t simply checking off a list and it only ever shows its hand in the most esoteric of ways. At it’s center is this wild performance by Denis Lavant which borders on a sort of performance art as he transitions between all sort so different “roles” for reasons that one should not try to explain through normal logic. It’s certainly not a movie I’d pick to show to someone who is only just getting into art films, it’s wild experimentation would probably scare them off, but as a sort of wild tribute to film’s past and future it’s hard not to embrace as one of the decade’s boldest visions.
19. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
 |
|
When Birdman came out in 2014 it became something of a whipping boy for a certain group of critics for reasons I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now. A lot of people were heavily against Alejandro González Iñárritu’s previous films because of their dour nature, which I suppose I understand, but those complaints would seem to have little bearing on his fifth and by far lightest film. Set in the world of New York theater, the film focuses in on the mental breakdown of a Hollywood actor as he tries to reinvent himself as a serious stage actor. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki used a variety of tricks in order to make the film appear to have been shot in a single take despite taking place over the course of several days and involving several fantasy sequences with heavy visual effects. This shooting style give the film some of the feeling of a stage play, which is appropriate given the milieu in which it’s set and it also gives a certain kinetic energy to the backstage goings-on. As the film goes on Iñárritu and his co-screenwriters provide a rather biting parody of the entertainment industry in the 2010s and the spectrum of good intentions and egotistical nonsense that goes into making art in the modern era. It’s certainly the most formally adventurous of the ten movies to win Best Picture during the decade and in many ways the most entertaining.
18. Inside Llewyn Davis
 |
|
One of the most awarded movies of the 2010s is La La Land, a movie about the nobility of following your dreams even when the odds seem to be against you. The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is in many ways about the dark side of following your dreams, about what happens when things don’t work out from you and when the world does not reward your artistry. Of course the person at the center of the film, the titular Llewyn Davis, is in many ways just as responsible as anyone for his own failures. Set in the 60s Greenwich Village Folk scene the film follows Davis has he tries to get over the loss of his former bandmate while also trying to get together enough money to get by all while maintaining artistic integrity. The film’s music, overseen by T Bone Burnett, is quite strong and throughout the movie you are convinced that Davis is indeed someone deserving of some success but he’s also pretty flawed as a person. He’s rarely vindictive but you can tell he’s a bit of a misanthrope and isn’t above burning bridges as he moves through life. It’s a bit more of a downer than your average Coen Brothers movie, but some of their dry wit is still present and they end the movie in an unconventional way that almost seems to invoke Buddhist principles of repeating cycles of life.
17. The Hateful Eight
 |
|
It is quite the irony of history that Quentin Tarantino made his eighth film The Hateful Eight over a decade before Donald Trump was allowed into the white house. Granted, Trump was on the political scene in the December of 2015 as his primary campaign was well under way, but Tarantino certainly wouldn’t have known that when he was writing or filming the movie. Despite the timing Tarantino certainly seemed to anticipate the wildly polarized political tone of the second half of the decade with his film, a tense “snow western” in which several unpleasant people from different parts of the country find themselves holed up in a remote building where they unleash all their post-Civil War resentments upon one another. The film doesn’t play the “very fine people on both sides” game of suggesting that all these people are silly in their resentments, on the contrary it’s sympathies lie pretty firmly on the side of Samuel L. Jackson’s former buffalo soldier rather than the former confederates played by Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern, but it does suggest that both sides are being played against each other by a rather Trump-like villain who they should be working together against. When I first saw the film I ended up writing a rather lengthy review where I pegged each character as representative of one political entity or another, and I might have been over-analyzing it a bit when I did that, but there’s definitely something going on beneath the surface of this thing that’s very emblematic of what’s going on today. But you don’t need to obsess over that to like the film. This is still very much a Quentin Tarantino movie and has most of the hallmarks that has made him one of the dominant voices in cinema like its non-chronological narrative, its canny cinematic homages, intense bursts of violence, and its bristling back and forth dialogue.
16. mother!
 |
|
After the surprise financial success of Black Swan left Darren Aronofsky with more studio clout that he ever had or probably ever will have. He cashed that in to make the Noah’s Ark movie that no one wanted and while that movie wasn’t uninteresting it certainly didn’t quite cohere. After that experience making an on the nose PG-rated bible movie he found himself making an extremely R-rated movie that was also secretly about the bible. The resulting film was one of the decade’s most divisive and polarizing movies. Mainstream audiences hated this thing, it got an F Cinemascore and people who went into it expecting more of a conventional horror movie had no idea what to make of what they were given. I loved it. Ignore any subtext and you’re still given this really intense and weird experience with the Jennifer Lawrence character going through what is essentially an introvert’s nightmare where she needs to deal with these crowds who enter her life and refuse to leave which manifests itself in increasingly surreal ways as the movie goes on. Then there’s the subtext, which is increasingly malleable depending on the viewer. In the movie’s wake a lot of people accused it of have a very “obvious” meaning and yet many of them seemed to have different ideas of what this “obvious” theme was with some saying it was about environmentalism, some saying it was about religion, some saying it was about the relationship between artist and muse. It’s actually probably a combination of all those things. Aronofsky reportedly wrote the movie in a five day burst of creativity and the film feels like a sort of creative freak out where the guy let loose with everything that’s important to him and resulting film feels like a chaotic expression of what life in the late 2010s feels like at times.
15. Parasite
 |
|
For me the historic Oscar winning success of Parasite kind of came out of nowhere. Bong Joon-ho had of course emerged as a filmmaker to watch but I’d never personally been a huge fan and he certainly didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would impress the likes of the Academy. His other two major films this decade, Snowpiercer and Okja, had been interesting if rather imperfect English language genre exercises that were trying to make points about capitalism using rather clumsy science fiction metaphors. Parasite in many ways strips Bong’s recent output down and presents a more bare bones but in no way less entertaining thriller that indicts capitalism just as hard but also refuses to make things simple for anyone involved. The film expertly blends disparate genres like heist movies, conman thrillers, dark comedies, and a pinch of horror to create an accessible yarn that has you closely following the exploits of these really well defined characters who each manage to build distinct personalities over a rather short running time. Things start out rather lighthearted but at the film’s midpoint we get an extended set-piece which kind of shifts the film’s tone and starts taking it in a different and more prickly direction and from there things start to get distinctly darker but in a way that feels natural and of a piece with what came before. It’s a film about class warfare, and while you don’t need to engage in that aspect of it if you don’t want to, it is deeper than it first appears.
14. If Beale Street Could Talk
 |
|
Moonlight was almost certainly a tough if not impossible act to follow but Barry Jenkins shot for the moon with his next effort and in my view he managed to do even better. With his newfound clout Jenkins opted to bring a James Baldwin novel to the screen, which is ambitious given that Baldwin’s work had rarely been adapted at all previously and certainly not adapted well. And the novel he chose was not one of Baldwin’s most famous works, it was one of his less read later works, but it turns out to have been rather well chosen given its focus on the hot topic of the way African Americans are treated in the criminal justice system. At its center the film is a romance which shows through flashbacks the budding of what should be a happy and prosperous family but the couple find themselves being undercut at pretty much every stage of their relationship by systemic racism, most egregiously when one of them is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. The film is plainly more overtly political than Moonlight was but as palpable as the injustice against Fonny is the film does ultimately feel more like a sort of tragic romance than it does an “issue” movie. On top of all that, Barry Jenkins visual filmmaking here is just immaculate. If Moonlight gave us a taste of how great this guy could make a movie look If Beale Street Could Talk is the feast that Jenkins and his team were capable of. It’s a movie that’s beautiful, touching, and socially conscious and it will forever be bizarre to me that critics didn’t manage to champion this to even greater heights than Moonlight went to.
13. Certified Copy
 |
|
In 2010, thirty seven years into his distinguished career, Abbas Kiarostami underwent a bit of a reinvention and entered a new phase of his career. It wasn’t a long lasting career phase as Kiarostami tragically died at 76 six years later (I believe this has the distinction of being the only movie on this list directed by someone who has since passed away), but it and his Japanese set follow-up Like Someone In Love suggested something of a new way of working for the filmmaker where he would work outside of his native Iran and with professional actors. Set in Italy but starring the French actress Juliette Binoche and the British opera singer William Shimell as two people who may or may not have ever been in a relationship meeting to discuss a book he’s recently written about the value of copied art and any number of other intellectual topics and over the course of their day it begins to sound like they aren’t the strangers they appeared to be and may have instead been former lovers who were playing some kind of game earlier. Kiarostami has of course always been a rather meta filmmaker who sets out to challenge our usual notions of narrative but there’s a certain playfulness this time around that feels distinct from what came before. In some ways the film operates on the same “it’s fascinating to watch smart people talk at length” level as Richard Linklater’s “Before” movies but there isn’t really anything “romantic” about Certified Copy even when it does start getting into the complexities of relationships. The whole film is a wonderful bit of intellectual game playing, the kind of smart international cinema that thrived in the 60s and 70s and which we don’t get as much of these days.
12. Jackie
 |
|
In and of itself nothing about “Jackie Kennedy biopic” really excited me when I heard this was getting made and even when I heard that the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín would be directing it wasn’t among the films I was most looking forward to but that was clearly a mistake. Back in 2016 the film was largely viewed in terms of Natalie Portman’s lead performance, which is indeed amazingly good, but that kind of unfairly overshadowed what is an amazing film overall. Larraín used some of the tricks he gained from making films like No, namely the incorporation of stock footage into historical narratives and shot the film in 16mm both to better match that footage and to give it an extra dose of intimacy. The film opts not to look at the full sweep of Jackie’s life but to specifically focus in on her time immediately after her husband’s assassination where she goes through something of an existential journey to contemplate what her life has meant up to this point and where she’ll go from there. Through this she’s able to explore her grief both in practical and spiritual terms but also the role she played in building certain myths about her slain husband and in shaping his legacy. It’s the movie from this decade that most desperately needs to be given a second look because it’s a tour-de-force of both writing and filmmaking that deserves a towering legacy of its own.
11. Blue is the Warmest Color
 |
|
When Blue is the Warmest Color opened at Cannes in 2013 it was a Palme d’Or winning triumph which was widely beloved but from the very beginning there was suspicion about how necessary its extended graphic lesbian sex scenes were and what motivations director Abdellatif Kechiche had in including them, complaints that were bolstered by some stories about how things were conducted on the set. While I always had some concerns about those on set stories, when analyzing the actual movie I found most of the concerns about the male gaze to be off base for a variety of reasons and championed the film as among the best of its year. In the years since Kechiche has done some things both inside and outside of his work that have made him a bit harder to defend and do lead me to think that some of his interest in lesbian sexuality here was prurient. That having been said, I am generally of the belief that authorial intent has its limits for both good and ill and that at the end of the day it’s the film itself that needs to be assessed free of extra-textual suspicions. Additionally, I’ve pointed out from the beginning that the sex scenes in the movie make up some five to ten minutes of a three hour runtime and that even if you truly do believe that those scenes are indefensible I still think there’s a lot of greatness in the film outside of them. The film is essentially a close examination of a short relationship between two young women in all its detail and really has you witness the both of them change and grow and eventually grow apart. This close detailed examination is what ultimately got it in trouble as it was seemingly what drove him to also show as much as he did about their time in the bedroom, after all, sex is a major part of most adult relationships and it would seem dishonest to not show that part of it as well. I’m probably going to have to continue to reassess how I feel about that one, especially if Kechiche keeps doing questionable things, but for now I’m not giving up on it.
10. A Prophet
 |
|
A Prophet kind of fell between the cracks when I was doing my year-end list making back in 2010. At the time I was viewing it more as a 2009 film which I had missed but it never actually played American theaters until 2010 and under my current criteria it would count as a 2010 film and is eligible for this list. The film is the work of Jacques Audiard, a French auteur who has been working since the mid-90s but who really came into his own with this movie and has maintained an uneven but interesting track record since then. The film is one part prison movie and one part gangster movie in that it’s about a small time criminal who starts the movie in jail and over the course of his sentence does favors for the right people and becomes something of a “player” and by the end of the film has become something of a small-time Scarface. It’s an interesting twist on the familiar “rise and fall” crime narrative, especially given that there isn’t really a “fall” here. I’m not sure that Audiard has any particular political statement to make about crime or the prison system. There could be something to be said for the fact that prison essentially makes his protagonist a more dedicated criminal than he was going in but he’s not really pointing out any particular systemic failing that caused this. Rather I think he’s just trying to tell a really good story and that makes this highly accessible as foreign art films go. Over the course of the decade it’s been something of a go-to for me as a movie to show friends who aren’t major film buff but who are open-minded enough to watch something a little different than what they’re used to and were it in English I think it would be held up right next to things like The Godfather and Goodfellas in the sort of canon of smart but highly watchable crime movies.
9. The Florida Project
 |
|
Movies about the proletariat starring non-actors certainly had their heyday during the Italian neo-realist era but generally speaking I find modern attempts to replicate the form rather tedious. There are of course exceptions to that which in many ways impress me all the more because they succeed where so many others have failed and in many ways the modern master of the form is Sean Baker. Baker toiled for a while in semi-obscurity before emerging in a big way with his 2015 film Tangerine, which was famously filmed on an iPhone, and then he managed to top himself with his next film The Florida Project. The Florida Project depicts something of an unseen underbelly of Orlando Florida where people who are dirt poor live in cheap hotels and the film depicts a mother and daughter who are living under such circumstances. The mother is not exactly what you’d consider an ideal parent… in fact you could pretty easily dismiss her as irresponsible “white trash” but she does legitimately seem to care about her daughter and you suspect that in a different life she would in fact be a different person entirely. Then there’s the daughter, who is a very young child and hasn’t really lived another life and remains very much a child despite the rather dire the audience sees her living in. That really isn’t a wildly unusual dynamic for these neo-neorealist movies but this one really seems to just get things particularly right and finds a location that seems uniquely suited to this sort of story given the juxtaposition between all this squalor and Disney World, which is essentially a giant playground for privileged families. After the success of Tangerine Baker had more resources to work with for this film and was able to film it in 35mm but retains the looseness that worked so well in the previous film and really seems to capture this world that would otherwise be out of sight and out of mind.
8. Winter Sleep
 |
|
The critical consensus is probably that Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterpiece this decade and that his follow-up Winter Sleep is also great but lesser, and they might not be wrong. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is like poetry on film and on a purely visual level it’s hard to beat, but I still like the next film better even though it is in many ways more like filmic prose. A sort of unofficial adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Wife” and a subplot from “The Brothers Karamazov,” Winter Sleep is a highly literate film with a focus on these really long and fascinating conversations between characters that you come to feel like you understand by the end of the film’s rather lengthy runtime. The film is essentially about a middle aged man who fancies himself as an intellectual and who has some power as a local landlord who, over the course of the film, slowly starts to realize that he’s kind of a blowhard and that everyone around him including his wife and his tenants resent him, but it approaches this in a very humanistic way that does a good job of making you understand how he could come to be as oblivious about this as he did over time. This is not, however, simply a talky movie as it also looks pretty stunning. It’s set in this area of rural Anatolia and the film captures it beautifully as a backdrop for all the human drama at the film’s center. It’s not the easiest film to recommend given that it’s a 196 minute Turkish film from an auteur who isn’t always the easiest to approach but for me it was simply one of the most engrossing viewing experiences of the entire decade.
7. Room
 |
|
Room is a movie that does not get talked about enough. In fact it’s in many ways a movie that people seem to just not want to talk about at all because it covers some very sensitive ground. The film is about a woman who is kidnapped and locked up in a shed for several years and gave birth to a son at some point after having been repeatedly raped. That’s about as dark of a concept as you can have and that kind of material could have been turned into a really grim, almost torture-porn-esque experience, but this movie doesn’t feel like that at all. Instead the film finds this approach where it tells the story largely but not exclusively from the perspective of the child, who hasn’t really known another life and kind of views the room they’re trapped in as the whole world. Now that approach comes with a whole lot of risks of its own and in the wrong hands could have the opposite problem of just being some treacly fluff but they avoid this as well by knowing when and to show things more from the mother’s perspective when they need to. Really the sheer number of ways that this whole thing could have gone wrong is a big part of why it’s such an impressive piece of work. Director Lenny Abrahamson basically just approached this minefield and found a way to skip right across it without triggering anything. On top of that he finds any number of ways to make the confined space visually interesting without resorting to lame gimmickry and he also directs some truly amazing performances by Brie Larson and a very young child named Jacob Tremblay who has gone on to a fairly successful career as a child performer.
6. Manchester by the Sea
 |
|
Kenneth Lonergan can be a tricky filmmaker to get a handle on, in part because he just isn’t very prolific, at least in the world of film. I think he views his work in the theater as being his day job and film as more of a side hustle and that’s part of why he’s only made three movies in twenty years and one of those movies kind of turned into an ordeal. But with his 2016 film Manchester By the Sea he really hit one clean out of the park. The film tells what is in many ways a simple and modern story but tells it with a certain perfection. It concerns a man who begins in a low place and has been dealing with a divorce and a tragedy in his past who comes to learn that his brother has died and that his will places him as the legal guardian of his teenage nephew. That’s a setup that could have easily been used to make a weak-ass “feel good” movie from the 80s, but the film Lonergan gives us is far more concerned with human reality than that. It is not, however, a movie that completely wallows in misery. In fact the movie finds some really ingenious ways to mix in comedy with tragedy and is in fact rather funny at times in its banter, but when the film does “get real” it is piercing. The acting here by Casey Affleck is truly amazing, there’s a reason he won the Academy Award for this despite a lot of bad publicity that would have prevented this had his work not been so incredible. Other performers like Michelle Williams, Lucas Hedges, and Kyle Chandler are also really good here and they’re given some really incredible dialogue to work with by Lonergan. There’s no one trick or concept that makes this movie work so incredibly, it’s an accumulation of dead on calibrations and insightful choice that just works out perfectly in the final film.
5. Inception
 |
|
Christopher Nolan’s Inception is the only film in my top ten to be made by a major studio and one of the only movies in my top fifty that could be described as a “blockbuster action movie.” So yes, that means that the Hollywood machine’s efforts in the decade peaked about seven months into 2010. In fact Inception kind of loomed large over the rest of Hollywood’s increasingly mechanized attempts at big budget entertainment over the course of the 2010s. With it Christopher Nolan proved rather definitively that Hollywood was capable of making movies that looked and felt more substantial than what Disney was giving us while still being a fucking blast. Make no mistake, Inception is very much an action movie. Most of the characters are armed and they frequently engage in shootouts, fist fights, and car stunts and at its heart the film is also essentially a heist movie with everything that that entails, but it does all of this in increasingly novel ways. The film’s concept of entering someone’s subconscious and going on an adventure there frees Nolan up to do a lot of cool stuff but he also diligently avoids making the film a free for all and instead gives his characters meticulous rules to follow and an elaborate structure in which different levels of the mind run on different timelines. It’s a four quadrant PG-13 movie but in many ways it looks more like an adult action movie than most tent poles of the time. It has a killer ensemble cast headed by Leonardo Di Caprio (who would prove to be one of the last true movie stars over the course of a decade), and each of them cruise through this experience wearing slick suits and carrying themselves with a sort of wealthy adult confidence. There’s a fairly credible fan theory that the movie is meant as something of an allegory for filmmaking with each character representing a different facet of the craft. It’s a fun lens to view the film through, but hardly an essential one, and there’s more fun to be had simply looking at it as a journey that its protagonist goes through as he puts himself through a mind bending ringer to finally put his life back together, a ringer that he may or may not have even gotten out of depending on how you interpret the film’s positively iconic final shot.
4. Son of Saul
 |
|
The Holocaust is never an easy subject to make movies about, though there is a long history of attempts and in many ways it had felt like it had explored in every way it could have been, then came Son of Saul. Where most movies about the Holocaust focus on stories on the genocide’s periphery, this one goes right into Auschwitz in on order to stare right into the abyss. The film focuses on a member of the Sonderkommando: a group of Holocaust victims who would be separated from the rest of the victims and forced at gunpoint to act as trustees at the death camps and shepherd other Jews to their deaths. They are a controversial element of Shoah Studies and they had been explored previously in Tim Blake Nelson’s film The Grey Zone, and as grim as that movie was it wasn’t visceral, Son of Saul by contrast is extremely visceral. The film is not a million miles removed from the sort of “experience” movies from this decade like Gravity and 1917, but in my view it is using this technique to a much more profound end, namely creating empathy for the people who went through what is likely the most horrifying experience of the 20th century. Throughout the film the camera almost always follows the film’s protagonist; a man who has a “break” at some point in the film and comes to believe on of the victims is his son whom he must try to bury. It’s not a single take stunt, there are cuts in the movie, but it sticks with the one character over the course of what is a more or less real time span and because the camera is basically over the guy’s shoulder a lot of the most grisly aspects are tastefully out of focus in a way that almost makes them more disturbing. This is one of only six movies on this list that is a feature film debut of its director and the fact that László Nemes chose such a project to tackle on his first go as a filmmaker is astonishing. This is not a “fun” movie to watch, in fact it’s an experience that will leave you rather shell-shocked, but it’s a film that leaves you feeling like you’ve had at least a slight glimpse at the human experience at its worst and that is something that puts a lot of things into perspective.
3. Boyhood
 |
|
The idea of filming a movie over the course of twelve years as a child grows into adulthood is one of those crazy-ass ideas that film students have while smoking weed in their dorm rooms, but Richard Linklater was actually audacious enough to actually do it and he actually managed to not only pull it off but pull it off masterfully. Linklater began making the film in 2001 when he cast a six year old named Ellar Coltrane to star in what is essentially the ultimate coming of age film and revisited him every year to film a new segment of the film. The character at the center, Mason Evans, is fictional and should not be considered to be a depiction of Coltrane himself but over the course of the film Linklater let the character evolve into someone who continued to fit his star. Linklater also managed to bring in Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke to play the boy’s parents and you see all three of these people (as well as Linklater’s daughter, who plays Mason’s sister) change over the course of the film in a way that’s almost unprecedented in film history. Watching the film is also something of a journey back into recent history and some of the historic and cultural milestones of the first two decades of the century which will be particularly poignant to millennials like myself who, though a little older, did more or less grow up during the same period and remember a lot of neat little details that you can spot in the film. This is not, however, just a portrait of a generation as there’s a lot of universal stuff here that I would think most people will recognize about what it means to be certain ages within adolescence and Linklater finds some really smart way to come across simple truths that don’t feel like clichés. He also edits the film in a really seamless way that resembles a sort of nostalgic trip through someone’s memories and uses period appropriate music in order to mark the passage of time. That this film got made is kind of a miracle and the fact that it worked out as well as it did is really a testament to Linklater’s care and skill.
2. The Master
 |
|
When I put together my list of the top 100 films of the 2000s I strongly considered making Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood at number one but ultimately balked and put it at number two behind City of God. Well, I hate to do Anderson like that again but the number two slot is where I’m putting this decade’s PTA classic as well. But make no mistake, someone managing to helm the second best film of two consecutive decades is actually an amazing achievement. The Master was made when Anderson’s career was red hot coming off of making a movie that is generally agreed to be a bona fide new classic. His follow-up dealt with a potentially controversial topic in Hollywood: the origins of the Church of Scientology, which it tackles through the fictionalized story of a similar organization in 1950s America led by an intimidating and yet oddly goofy man played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in what was probably his last great performance. And as great as Hoffman is, even he’s eclipsed by what Joaquin Phoenix does in the film as a troubled war veteran who finds himself in the circle of this borderline-cult leader and goes through all kinds of erratic behavior from unbridled rage to sheer sycophancy. Anderson shot the film in 70mm and managed to capture some really striking images in what is essentially a dialogue driven drama. It’s a movie that feels like an intertwined companion piece with There Will Be Blood, but on a narrative level it’s actually a very distinct film from that which focuses more on a weird relationship between two people than as a portrait of a single towering figure. It’s the kind of ambitious filmmaking that we look for from our auteurs and it’s an achievement that the world is still kind of coming to grips.
1. A Separation
 |
|
Choosing a top 100 list for this decade really wasn’t all that hard. There weren’t a ton of painful cuts in the 101-120 area and if anything a few of the movies that made it on the list were kind of lucky to have made it. Choosing an order for most of them also wasn’t painfully hard, after all I did have some pretty clear tiers of hierarchy to work with. But the one thing I scratched my head about and dithered on almost to the last minute was what was going to be my number one choice because that was something I wasn’t sure about at all. For the longest time I had another movie penciled in for that slot, and then I switched it out for something else, nothing ever felt quite right. But then things finally clicked into place when I started thinking about Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation as my top choice. There were other choices that were more technologically innovative and shot with more skill and scope, there were also choices that were more directly relevant to the political and social currents of the decade, and there were choices that more clearly emblemized the filmmaking trends of the decade… but none of those movies were as perfect as A Separation. For those who don’t know the film is about a man and a woman living in Tehran who are going through a divorce and who also find themselves enmeshed in a separate lawsuit and throughout the movie Farhadi employs a brilliant humanist eye for seeing everyone’s perspective in this complicated situation and building each character in a richly detailed way. The film is set in a faraway place that’s frequently opposed to my own country and differs from my own culture on any number of political, religious, and legal dimensions and yet this film in many ways doesn’t feel “foreign” at all outside of the language barrier. It also isn’t an inaccessible and challenging “art” movie that I can’t easily recommend to most people, on the contrary there’s a simplicity and directness to its storytelling and style that makes it truly universal for anyone who watches it. In the years since making the film Farhadi has made a number of films, many quite good but few that reach the level of mastery he achieved in this breakout film. Perhaps he captured lightening in a bottle with A Seperation, a film with nary a single element I’d want changed and which I have basically no reservations about endorsing. I rarely throw around the word “masterpiece” anymore as that’s a label I’m increasingly only comfortable attaching to movies decades down the line, but if any movie from this decade has been a masterpiece it’s probably this one.
The Movie Vampire 