Since we have arrived at the end of a decade - the decade during which my love and knowledge of cinema started taking full form - I nevertheless thought it fitting to belatedly join my peers and record my thoughts on the last ten years of film for posterity. To see an entire decade of human expression pass, after all, is always cause for celebration, reflection and wonder.
This has been a difficult decade indeed for the cinematic arts; as the banalization of digital techniques and equipment yielded new methods for visual exploration and access to stories that might otherwise have remained untold or told with insufficient firsthand knowledge, audiences have been steadily dividing themselves across mediums, politics and subcultures. For better and for worse, in this interconnected and globalized world, the act of watching films is no longer as homogeneous as it once appeared to be - but was it truly ever? The welcome growth of diversity among storytelling and critical voices now being heard in the western audiovisual landscape indicates no. From this, we may infer a clue as to one of the traits shared by this decade's best films: informed by the cultural, national, ethnic, political and social specificities of their creators and subjects, they shine a light on the remarkable disparateness of human experiences as would an individual mosaic piece. Taken together, they elevate our understanding of the feelings, impulses, desires and mysteries that unite us as a species - and the forces and circumstances that shape them each uniquely.
Without further ado, here goes my first list:
Best Films Of Each Year:
2010: Certified Copy
The passing of Abbas Kiarostami on July 4th of 2016 has left a void in human culture that can never be filled. At a time of rising nationalism and its consequent inter-ethnic and inter-religious tension, the unassuming power of his meditative humanism is all the more palpable in masterworks such as Through The Olive Trees, Taste Of Cherry and The Report. In his first narrative fiction set and filmed entirely outside Iran in languages other than Persian, Kiarostami investigates the mysterious energies that animate human interactions through the making, unmaking and remaking of a newly-acquainted couple (British opera singer William Shimell and French acting titan Juliette Binoche) whose personal histories, beliefs and fantasies gradually intertwine to the point of reshaping their very identities.
Kiarostami's greatest quality as a filmmaker was always his patience. As an attentive observer of the passage of time and the people that change or resist change within its flow, he put viewers face-to-face with their own changing feelings through the experiences of people - both characters and actors - whose every interaction with another person forces them to readjust their knowledge of themselves and, in more extreme cases, makes them reckon with their own mortality. Transported away from the poetic verité neo-realism that forged his most familiar work, Kiarostami's art finds within the codes of European romance an ideal frame to express itself in new and innovative ways.
Revisiting Roberto Rossellini's Journey To Italy in its setting and themes, Certified Copy turns modern European intellectual discourse over art and authenticity into a framework in which the protagonists' own ideas about who they are, what they want and their relationship to each other get called into question, re-imagined and reified in a series of conversations whose true subject is in constant modulation. Kiarostami's direction of Binoche and Shimell is a wonder to behold; like a semi-improvisational orchestra, their combined efforts reach a level of artistry that transfigures cultural and temporal barriers into points of origin for a new path forward. It's as fitting a tribute from one neo-realist master to another as could possibly exist, and an exemplary demonstration of cinema's ability to open new avenues of thought.
2011: Melancholia
Lars Von Trier has tested the limits of art-as-therapy with more extreme disregard for audiences' tolerance than perhaps any other male filmmaker of the past 20 years save Caveh Zahedi. His off-screen behaviour, from juvenile jokes about being a Nazi to allegations of sexual harassment on the set of Dancer In The Dark levelled by Björk, has made it increasingly difficult to defend his on-screen output, particularly as recent films like Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, Vol. II play more like cinematic extensions of his edgelord misogyny rather than the critical self-evaluations thereof they pertained to be.
Melancholia would still be an outstanding work of art even without these points of comparison, but its honest lack of self-pity or excuses single it out not only among Von Trier's œuvre but among the totality of recorded human expression of the 21st century so far. Juxtaposing the gradual psychological fragmentation of a depressive bride's family unit with the incoming destruction of Earth by a rogue planet, Von Trier composes an apocalyptic opera that is both grand and intimate, as spiritually nihilistic as it is humanly empathetic.
Through career-best central performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, he gives voice to his existential pain and conflicted relationship with his human brethren with a sincerity unencumbered by the cynicism or learned melodrama he had previously deployed as narrative self-defence mechanisms. As achingly acute in its portrayal of depression as in its observations of familial cruelty, Melancholia nonetheless reveals itself, through the prism of its outlook, as a bittersweet ode to human existence whose poignancy remains uniquely affecting to this day.
Through career-best central performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, he gives voice to his existential pain and conflicted relationship with his human brethren with a sincerity unencumbered by the cynicism or learned melodrama he had previously deployed as narrative self-defence mechanisms. As achingly acute in its portrayal of depression as in its observations of familial cruelty, Melancholia nonetheless reveals itself, through the prism of its outlook, as a bittersweet ode to human existence whose poignancy remains uniquely affecting to this day.
2012: The Master
Of all modern American filmmaking auteurs, Paul Thomas Anderson is the most difficult to pin down. In the course of eight narrative features, his modus operandi has been consistent: take established genres, replicate the style and plots of instantly-identifiable cinematic masters who modernized them, and infuse them with narratives about lonely, broken people seeking or fleeing from connection - usually with a father or son figure - and validation. Yet within each story subsists an underlying conversation with its spiritual forebears that continues across each film, each instalment providing meaning that builds upon and complicates its predecessor.
The Master is in that respect the most exemplary of Anderson's films: even more obliquely plotted and dialogued than There Will Be Blood, it continues the 2007 masterpiece's dissection of masculine power struggles between the spiritual and the carnal - this time substituting the influence of John Huston's epic myths of greed with Stanley Kubrick's clinical Steadicam studies of the "ignoble savage" that is Man. On one side, sex-addicted drifter Freddie Quell - played beyond all superlatives by Joaquin Phoenix as a being of pure instinct, moulded by primal needs he barely seems to understand. On the other side, the irreplaceable Philip Seymour Hoffman's charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd - a man so used to suppressing his own needs that they manifest as spluttering explosions of rage whenever anyone dares to prod at the haphazard set of pseudo-mystical abstrusities he created as a substitute.
The duet/duel between Phoenix and Hoffman - one of the great acting miracles of modern cinema - serves the centre-piece of a dissonant symphony that never lets the viewer settle on a single emotional or intellectual response, putting them in a state of uneasy wandering reflective of the characters' relationships (and reflected in Jonny Greenwood's masterfully atonal score). Thus does The Master confirm the evolution of Paul Thomas Anderson's art: anchored in American cinema's aesthetic history but now emancipated from its codes and structures, it takes flight to uncharted galaxies of feeling whose every exploration yields only more territory to discover.
The Master is in that respect the most exemplary of Anderson's films: even more obliquely plotted and dialogued than There Will Be Blood, it continues the 2007 masterpiece's dissection of masculine power struggles between the spiritual and the carnal - this time substituting the influence of John Huston's epic myths of greed with Stanley Kubrick's clinical Steadicam studies of the "ignoble savage" that is Man. On one side, sex-addicted drifter Freddie Quell - played beyond all superlatives by Joaquin Phoenix as a being of pure instinct, moulded by primal needs he barely seems to understand. On the other side, the irreplaceable Philip Seymour Hoffman's charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd - a man so used to suppressing his own needs that they manifest as spluttering explosions of rage whenever anyone dares to prod at the haphazard set of pseudo-mystical abstrusities he created as a substitute.
The duet/duel between Phoenix and Hoffman - one of the great acting miracles of modern cinema - serves the centre-piece of a dissonant symphony that never lets the viewer settle on a single emotional or intellectual response, putting them in a state of uneasy wandering reflective of the characters' relationships (and reflected in Jonny Greenwood's masterfully atonal score). Thus does The Master confirm the evolution of Paul Thomas Anderson's art: anchored in American cinema's aesthetic history but now emancipated from its codes and structures, it takes flight to uncharted galaxies of feeling whose every exploration yields only more territory to discover.
2013: Camille Claudel 1915
No filmmaker's art evolved in the 2010s to such boundary-expanding degrees quite like Bruno Dumont's. Renowned for his austere Bressonian tableaux contrasting humanity's moral and physical lows with its spiritual highs, the French Master of Misery had up until then made a point of casting non-professional locals in stories whose indomitable bleakness made their precious few rays of light shine all the brighter.
Camille Claudel 1915 marked a decisive turn in Dumont's body of work from which he has never since looked back; a portrait of a few days in the life of sculptor Camille Claudel three years into her forced institutionalization, the film stars Dumont's first professional actor - and what an actor! - Juliette Binoche in the title role, surrounded by real-life patients and doctors of the Avignon Montfavet Hospital Center playing themselves in an early 20th-century context. This genius casting decision creates a sense of innate anatopism around Binoche's presence that generates a transcendental empathy for both her and her co-stars, as each interaction strips away the medium's layers of artifice to expose each other's humanity with miraculous power. Each prolonged still shot of Claudel's face or one of her tormentors', each pan following her fellow patients' movements and gestures, act like communicating vessels filling each other with hitherto unseen meaning.
What Dumont achieves here goes beyond a mere spectacle of martyrdom; as he has always done and continues to do now with the anachronistic rock opera of Jeannette: The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc and the surreal comedy of Coincoin And The Extra-Humans, he turns the marginalized, the non-normative and the banal into magnified mirrors of our own personhood, exposing us to different ways of seeing and being. In Camille Claudel 1915's tragic subject, we find one of the most revealing and graceful mirrors ever offered to an audience - and arguably the greatest performance of Juliette Binoche's illustrious career.
Camille Claudel 1915 marked a decisive turn in Dumont's body of work from which he has never since looked back; a portrait of a few days in the life of sculptor Camille Claudel three years into her forced institutionalization, the film stars Dumont's first professional actor - and what an actor! - Juliette Binoche in the title role, surrounded by real-life patients and doctors of the Avignon Montfavet Hospital Center playing themselves in an early 20th-century context. This genius casting decision creates a sense of innate anatopism around Binoche's presence that generates a transcendental empathy for both her and her co-stars, as each interaction strips away the medium's layers of artifice to expose each other's humanity with miraculous power. Each prolonged still shot of Claudel's face or one of her tormentors', each pan following her fellow patients' movements and gestures, act like communicating vessels filling each other with hitherto unseen meaning.
What Dumont achieves here goes beyond a mere spectacle of martyrdom; as he has always done and continues to do now with the anachronistic rock opera of Jeannette: The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc and the surreal comedy of Coincoin And The Extra-Humans, he turns the marginalized, the non-normative and the banal into magnified mirrors of our own personhood, exposing us to different ways of seeing and being. In Camille Claudel 1915's tragic subject, we find one of the most revealing and graceful mirrors ever offered to an audience - and arguably the greatest performance of Juliette Binoche's illustrious career.
2014: Under The Skin
In my original review of Jonathan Glazer's minimalist science-fiction masterpiece, I called it a "bold and beautiful look" at humankind through an alien gaze, an exploration of Otherness that would be worthy of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout were it not for a slasher-movie ending I judged to be unimaginative and disappointing. While I believe all the other points I made still hold up, I wish to recant that last one; Under The Skin's ending is not only good, it's probably the only ending that could have taken the film's ideas and themes to a logical conclusion.
Indeed, revisited in the context of today's post-Weinstein era, Under The Skin's clinical dissection of desire, gendered bodies and body autonomy feels almost radical. As Dumont did with Camille Claudel 1915, Glazer dips one of cinema's most recognizable female faces in a sea of near-total strangers and forces us to wrestle with our preconceived perceptions of her and how we relate to her as a fellow human. And the results - unsurprisingly, necessarily - make us deeply uncomfortable.
Scarlett Johansson's unnamed alien's experience of her (their? its?) body frightens and disquiets as much as it intrigues and entrances. The world seen through her alert, curious eyes is like a fairy tale moodscape where princes and big bad wolves can seamlessly switch roles and where her own existence is a tragically unassimilable anomaly. Through her journey of self-discovery, Glazer paints one of the bleakest, strangest and most thought-provoking pictures of personhood - and womanhood - yet committed to film.
2015: Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Chloé Zhao is the best filmmaker of her generation. I realize such grand pronouncements are so commonplace in media parlance as to be rendered meaningless, but I feel as much confidence in this one as saying water is wet. No other director under 40 has given life to human emotions and dreams with as much unpretentious truth or intelligent sensitivity, and all these qualities are plain to see in this quietly earth-shaking first feature.
Songs My Brothers Told Me, which my original review described as "bucolic neorealism", stars Lakota inhabitants of the Pine Ridge reserve as dramatized versions of themselves as they struggle with self-definition through connections to their traditions, to outsiders or to each other. This struggle is given spiritual, physical and human profundity by impeccably natural lead performances from Jashaun St. John and John Reddy as a brother and sister duo whose differing relationship with their roots shapes the eventual paths they take.
Zhao films these conflicts with such respectful distance, such intuitive understanding of the characters' relationship with their environment and such trust in both her performers and audience that the very act of watching her film feels sacred. Like most great art, it draws your attention to facets of human existence that were always under your nose and reveals them in such a way that your perceptions are permanently changed for the better. 2015 was a year rich in powerful feature-length débuts, from László Nemes's Son Of Saul to Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior, but Songs My Brothers Taught Me stands proudly above them as one of the undisputedly best films of the decade.
2016: Elle
There is no actor alive more fearless than Isabelle Huppert. From the moment she first turned heads as a rebellious teenage girl in the final scenes of Bernard Blier's Going Places in 1974, the Paris native has challenged, shocked and surprised audiences with subtle, multi-layered performances as complicated women like The Piano Teacher's Erika Kohut, The Lacemaker's Pomme or the titular Violette Nozière - women with nebulous inner lives, whose desires, words and actions often seem at odds with good taste, moral convention, logic or common sense yet are always bound by a cohesive discernible purpose.
Elle's Michèle Leblanc, then, can be seen as the character all of Huppert's previous creations were building up to; an independent video game developer haunted by the memory of her murderous father, engaged in a sexual game of cat-and-mouse with a man who may or may not have brutally raped her, determined to assert control over her life, body and feelings in her own way regardless of consequences. A character who resists the exterior factors that shape life at the risk of endangering herself socially, psychologically and physically.
Thanks to the surgical precision of Huppert's deadpan performance and Paul Verhoeven's Machiavellian direction, that resistance extends to audience interpretation; for all the revelations David Birke and Harold Manning's screenplay share with us about her past, for all the flashes of vulnerability Michèle grants us, she stubbornly defies characterisation and continually forces us to revisit our responses. This uneasily murky complexity is just one of many things that make Elle a creative pinnacle for both its lead actor and its director.
Thanks to the surgical precision of Huppert's deadpan performance and Paul Verhoeven's Machiavellian direction, that resistance extends to audience interpretation; for all the revelations David Birke and Harold Manning's screenplay share with us about her past, for all the flashes of vulnerability Michèle grants us, she stubbornly defies characterisation and continually forces us to revisit our responses. This uneasily murky complexity is just one of many things that make Elle a creative pinnacle for both its lead actor and its director.
2017: Phantom Thread
Paul Thomas Anderson has always been a comic master. Punch-Drunk Love and Inherent Vice may be his only forays into overt comedy as of this writing, but even the sombre majesty of There Will Be Blood, The Master and Magnolia was buoyed by a sly satirical undercurrent that complicated our emotional responses to them. That satire has never been more clear or sophisticated than in Phantom Thread, which absorbs the very best of Alfred Hitchcock's glamorously objectifying aesthetics all the better to thoroughly dress down the very myth of tortured misogynistic male genius he embodies.
As filmed by Anderson, the emotionally abusive Pygmalionesque relationship between fashion designer Woodcock Reynolds (Daniel Day-Lewis in his supposedly final performance) and his new model Alma (the revelation that is Vicky Krieps) has the quality of a poisoned apple; the opulent splendour of the lighting, gowns and sets ensnare us even as the chiaroscuro lighting and shallow depth of field alert us to the trap. But what initially seems like poison soon reveals itself as precious, liberating comedy - comedy that shifts our perceptions of the characters' behaviour and enrich their humanity even as it highlights the situation's dark absurdity.
More than a deconstruction of artistic masculinity, Phantom Thread represents a culmination in its creator's lifelong study of the emotional yearnings and feelings of incompletion that so often drive the best - and worst - in human relationships. At a time when power dynamics in heterosexual relationships are under much-needed scrutiny, Paul Thomas Anderson's willingness to explore the needs and feelings behind them make his eighth feature as necessary as it is timeless.
As filmed by Anderson, the emotionally abusive Pygmalionesque relationship between fashion designer Woodcock Reynolds (Daniel Day-Lewis in his supposedly final performance) and his new model Alma (the revelation that is Vicky Krieps) has the quality of a poisoned apple; the opulent splendour of the lighting, gowns and sets ensnare us even as the chiaroscuro lighting and shallow depth of field alert us to the trap. But what initially seems like poison soon reveals itself as precious, liberating comedy - comedy that shifts our perceptions of the characters' behaviour and enrich their humanity even as it highlights the situation's dark absurdity.
More than a deconstruction of artistic masculinity, Phantom Thread represents a culmination in its creator's lifelong study of the emotional yearnings and feelings of incompletion that so often drive the best - and worst - in human relationships. At a time when power dynamics in heterosexual relationships are under much-needed scrutiny, Paul Thomas Anderson's willingness to explore the needs and feelings behind them make his eighth feature as necessary as it is timeless.
2018: The Rider
Be it the scientific instrument it was initially conceived as, the popular entertainment it turned out to be or the art form it was subsequently theorised as, cinema's primary purpose has, with some exceptions, always remained the same: to observe and understand human life through the recording of movement. Of this decade's best films, Chloé Zhao's The Rider is the one that fulfils that purpose with the most purity, staying true to all three aforementioned primal conceptions of cinema as it chronicles the extraordinary ordinariness of one man's life.
The man in question is Brady Jandreau, or rather his on-screen alter ego Brady Blackburn, a Lakota cowboy whose promising rodeo career is brutally aborted by a head injury. Before Zhao's camera, this quiet and unassuming man becomes a cinematic subject of uncommonly powerful eloquence whose every glance, gesture and pace translates complex emotional states into common practical actions. All of his interactions with fellow humans, horses and nature, bound as they are by a common defiance of his conditions, expose an entire life's worth of discoveries taking shape for the very first time before our eyes.
Continuing Songs My Brothers Taught Me's dramatization of Pine Ridge Reservation denizens' aspirations, frustrations and relationship with their environment, Chloé Zhao finds in the careful observation of human and animal movement their most vivid and intimate expression. If movies are indeed, as Roger Ebert famously called them, "machines that generate empathy", then The Rider stands as one of the decade's most vital inventions for the myriad ways in which it enables a better understanding of a little-represented people and indeed the human race itself.
The man in question is Brady Jandreau, or rather his on-screen alter ego Brady Blackburn, a Lakota cowboy whose promising rodeo career is brutally aborted by a head injury. Before Zhao's camera, this quiet and unassuming man becomes a cinematic subject of uncommonly powerful eloquence whose every glance, gesture and pace translates complex emotional states into common practical actions. All of his interactions with fellow humans, horses and nature, bound as they are by a common defiance of his conditions, expose an entire life's worth of discoveries taking shape for the very first time before our eyes.
Continuing Songs My Brothers Taught Me's dramatization of Pine Ridge Reservation denizens' aspirations, frustrations and relationship with their environment, Chloé Zhao finds in the careful observation of human and animal movement their most vivid and intimate expression. If movies are indeed, as Roger Ebert famously called them, "machines that generate empathy", then The Rider stands as one of the decade's most vital inventions for the myriad ways in which it enables a better understanding of a little-represented people and indeed the human race itself.
2019: The Irishman
Loneliness haunts Martin Scorsese's filmography as tenaciously as sin does. Whether you're a Vietnam veteran-turned-vigilante, a powerful Hollywood mogul, a Las Vegas mob boss or our Lord and Saviour Himself, to be a Scorsese protagonist is to live a life of moral and spiritual isolation with nothing but your own conscience for company.
The Irishman - or as its opening credits call it, The Irishman: I Heard You Paint Houses - embodies this loneliness as profoundly and as poignantly as the very best of the American master's work, inhabited as it is by an encroaching awareness of his own mortality. Not since Ingmar Bergman's Saraband has a film felt so intricately intertwined with its maker's specific place in time. Recent attempts to "correct" the film's much-discussed de-aging effects, however impressive, miss the point; the effects, like the masterful performances they ornate, are just another disguised mark of time - an omen of death as potent as the Xs in Howard Hawks' Scarface.
This morbidity, coupled with its many material and aesthetic connections to previous Scorsese crime epics, is what gives The Irishman its slow-burning emotional power. Composed like a bittersweet funerary dirge to its creator's career and the America he lived and shaped, it faces the future with the placid resignation of one who knows their time is nearing its end, embodied in one final, hauntingly beautiful shot that ranks among the most perfect to ever close a film. It is what it is.
The Irishman - or as its opening credits call it, The Irishman: I Heard You Paint Houses - embodies this loneliness as profoundly and as poignantly as the very best of the American master's work, inhabited as it is by an encroaching awareness of his own mortality. Not since Ingmar Bergman's Saraband has a film felt so intricately intertwined with its maker's specific place in time. Recent attempts to "correct" the film's much-discussed de-aging effects, however impressive, miss the point; the effects, like the masterful performances they ornate, are just another disguised mark of time - an omen of death as potent as the Xs in Howard Hawks' Scarface.
This morbidity, coupled with its many material and aesthetic connections to previous Scorsese crime epics, is what gives The Irishman its slow-burning emotional power. Composed like a bittersweet funerary dirge to its creator's career and the America he lived and shaped, it faces the future with the placid resignation of one who knows their time is nearing its end, embodied in one final, hauntingly beautiful shot that ranks among the most perfect to ever close a film. It is what it is.
