Well, here we are. In the middle of a pandemic, with a lot of spare time, stagnant film industries and a state of permanent uncertainty hovering in our minds. A perfect time to conclude my much-belated look back at the past decade in cinema and count down the 30 films that stand heads and shoulders above all others. As I indicated in the first part, this is a selection of films whose diversity of backgrounds, subjects, styles and genres offer a multiplicity of perspectives into the drive for happiness, meaning and purpose we all share. On a personal level, each one was an emotional and intellectual experience that left me a richer person than I was before I sat down to watch them. Whether they made me laugh, made me cry, cheered me up, enraged me, frustrated me, confused me or caused me discomfort, they opened doors in my mind through which I accessed parts of myself that might otherwise have been left unexplored. I sincerely hope to transmit parts of that experience to readers, if only in brief snippets, across each of the following entries.
Before we begin, I would like to address a couple of small caveats on the issue of television. It is a fact largely acknowledged that in the past two decades, televisual storytelling has more than equalled cinematic storytelling and, in some respects, may even have surpassed it. The venerable Cahiers Du Cinéma all but entrenched this truth into global cinephile consciousness by putting Twin Peaks' belated third season, Twin Peaks: The Return, on top of both their list of best films of 2017 and, more recently, their list of best films of the decade. While I entirely agree that the third season of Twin Peaks constitutes an achievement that towers above most entries on the following list, I believe boundaries between televised and cinematic experiences should nevertheless be maintained, for the sake of coherence. For similar reasons, while I consider miniseries to be fragmented films and even acknowledge those screened at film festivals* or given limited theatrical distribution, this list will not include such stellar recent examples as Sharp Objects or Coincoin And The Extra-Humans, but I would like to take a brief moment to salute director Jean-Marc Vallée and creator Marti Noxon's superb dissection of generational trauma through a modernization of the Southern Gothic, as well as Bruno Dumont's thought-provoking, often discomfiting surrealist farce on the cultural and political identity crises currently traversing France.
And now, without further ado...
Honourable mentions:
- Inception by Christopher Nolan (2010).
- Jeanne by Bruno Dumont (2019).
- The Handmaiden by Park Chan-Wook (2016).
- Raw by Julia Ducournau (2017).
- Get Out by Jordan Peele (2017).
30 - Inside Out by Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen (2010).
How fitting that this bittersweet dramatization of juvenile emotional growth would prove to be Pixar's most mature and poignant undertaking outside of the Toy Story franchise. First-tier voicework from Amy Poehler and especially Phyllis Smith humanize the most colourfully poetic journey through childhood development since Terence Davies' masterpiece The Long Day Closes.
29 - Clouds Of Sils Maria by Olivier Assayas (2014).
Olivier Assayas combines the psychosocial mysteries of L'Avventura with the feminine inter-generational conflicts of All About Eve, and from that union creates an empathetic examination of age, storytelling and identity in today's cultural landscape. Juliette Binoche and a never-better Kristen Stewart embody, confront and juggle personas with masterful subtlety, confirming the former's golden age and the latter's long-misunderstood brilliance in one of the decade's best acting duets.
28 - Uncut Gems by Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie (2019).
The Safdie brothers take their immersion into fast life on the margins of New York City life to dizzying new dimensions in a superbly-textured, richly-detailed thriller bolstered by Adam Sandler's very best performance, which I very reluctantly had to leave out of Part 2's honourable mentions for lack of space. Few films have dramatized contemporary American capitalism's moral and social consequences on so small a scale with such razor-sharp precision.
27 - Hereditary by Ari Aster (2018).
Amidst the treasure trove this new Golden Age of western horror has uncovered (The Babadook, Get Out, Raw, It Follows), Ari Aster's feature début stands as the scariest, saddest and most rigorously-executed of all. A dark, fatalistic, at times perversely humourous slow-burner, Hereditary conveys the unspeakably intimate pain at the heart of most great horror with an acuity unlike anything else released this decade.
26 - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman (2018).
In a cinematic decade saturated with galaxy-saving superhero mega-narratives, who could have predicted Marvel Studios' mould would be broken by a Marvel-owned property? Leaning on co-screenwriter Phil Lord's intuitive understanding of pop culture and using diversity as their driving force, the PRR directing trio gets to the very heart of superhero stories' universal appeal and conjure a mosaic of colours, styles and characters unlike anything the genre - or feature-length animation itself - have ever seen.
25 - The Wolf Of Wall Street by Martin Scorsese (2013).
No American filmmaker alive understands American capitalist mythology as well as Martin Scorsese, as this satirical crime opera demonstrates with exhaustingly Dionysian fervour. Propelled by the masterful comic energy of lead tenor DiCaprio, Scorsese perfects with The Wolf Of Wall Street a cinema of constant forward momentum he'd been building up to for the past twenty years, the climax of which elegantly transitions into yet another entry on this list...
24 - If Beale Street Could Talk by Barry Jenkins (2018).
Like in a half-remembered dream, Barry Jenkins extracts from James Baldwin's acclaimed novel** pigments of joy and pain that give this lush watercolour celebration of Black love a bittersweet taste of yesterdays that could have been and tomorrows that may yet come to be. Jenkins's impeccable attention to movement, texture and touch ground his formal sumptuousness in a sensual form of humanity that finds in its superb cast its most understatedly eloquent expression.
23 - The Immigrant by James Gray (2013).
America's greatest contemporary classicist signs his best film yet, exploring the young American Dream's poisonous ecosystem of power in a labyrinthine maze of emotional smoke and mirrors led by Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix at their best. The final shot (above) still haunts my mind.
22 - Moonlight by Barry Jenkins (2016).
Barry Jenkins arranges the fragments of a single boy's journey to manhood into a sensuous poem of neon, touch and gazes through which human identity embraces - and transcends - the sum of its marginalized parts. Rarely has an American film simultaneously embodied and subverted the national motto E Pluribus Unum - out of many, one - with such literality or more grace.
21 - The Last Black Man In San Francisco by Joe Talbot (2019).
Under first-timer Joe Talbot's open-hearted direction, star and co-writer Jimmie Fails's semi-autobiographical struggle with familial heritage becomes a poignant allegory for Black American history and identity, buoyed by a deft sensitivity to its predominantly male characters' inner histories and varied expressions of masculinity. Fails's outstanding work on both fronts, supported by a revelatory turn from Jonathan Majors and a small but unforgettable turn from the ever-magnificent Rob Morgan, make this parting sweet sorrow indeed.
20 - The Irishman by Martin Scorsese (2019).
Scorsese completes his criminal chronicle of American history with a monument of sneakily disquieting self-reflection, moving with the clear-headed slow pace of a condemned man on his last day. Possibly the most moving look back an artist has made at their own career since Ingmar Bergman's Saraband, with career-best work from Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro's finest performance in decades.
19 - Burning by Lee Chang-Dong (2018).
South Korea's soulful observer of social self-harm concocts an intoxicating tale of obsession and envy whose mysteries, more than simple thrill-inducing devices, set the stage for an engrossing study of behaviour in an unequal society. You'll never look at a sunset the same way again.
18 - No Home Movie by Chantal Akerman (2016).
Chantal Akerman's achingly intimate account of her relationship with her mother shortly before their respective deaths may be the greatest act of filial love ever committed to screen, and a hauntingly fitting conclusion to a career spent contemplating the slow effects of time on our lives, our bodies and the spaces we occupy with them.
17 - Tangerine by Sean Baker (2015).
With three smartphones, Los Angeles's blinding sun and an extraordinary cast of non-professionals, Sean Baker illuminates the joys, pains and cruelties of life on the fast lane with blissful radiance and humbling empathy. A life-affirming, unflinching, gorgeously multi-faceted modern movie miracle.
16 - Heaven Knows What by Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie (2015).
The Safdies turn Arielle Holmes's autobiographical account of homelessness and addiction on the pitiless streets of New York City into a nerve-wracking confession of loneliness and emotional confusion, anchored by a performance of uncompromising bravery from Holmes as her fictionalized self. Let us hope it gets more attention after Uncut Gems's deserved success, for it is the brothers' best film to date.
15 - Margaret by Kenneth Lonergan (2011).
Post-9/11 America gets a long-awaited psychological autopsy in the form of a realist allegorical story of uncomfortable social acuity and generously rich characterization, best described as Bergman-era Rossellini as seen through Maupassant's cynical lens. In its crusading adolescent heroine, constantly ping-ponging between Abrahamic self-martyrdom and moral narcissism, Anna Paquin composes one of this decade's great acting partitions.
14 - Mad Max: Fury Road by George Miller (2015).
George Miller distils action cinema down to its simplest original subject - the chase scene - and returns to the genre's roots, making the action itself (and every element composing it) a clear signifier of character, purpose and idea. An audiovisual (and political) masterclass on how to move forward by going back to basics.
13 - Silence by Martin Scorsese (2016).
Martin Scorsese made three of his best films this decade, and this long-gestating epic is the best of them. Continuing The Last Temptation Of Christ's questioning of Christian morality, Silence navigates through the troubled waters of colonialism and oppression in a tempestuous quest for answers that reveals, as its creator previously did in Taxi Driver, the inextinguishable hubris that animates God's lonely men.
12 - Appropriate Behaviour by Desiree Akhavan (2015).
Triple threat Desiree Akhavan converts personal inner experience into an initiative sexual journey of eye-opening emotional frankness, resulting in a comedy whose pains, shocks and discomforts fuel this decade's most rewarding laughs. The overwhelming sensation I felt at its conclusion, the elated realization that I had just witnessed the birth of something unique, beautiful and new that would engender many more of its kind, reminded me exactly why I love cinema so.
11 - Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2010).
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's sixth feature takes us on a spiritual journey across life and death in a series of hypnotic tableaus in which Thailand's great painter of time examines the echoes we leave in the lives surrounding our own. Perhaps no other film about death has felt quite like such an approximation of the real thing; watching it is like going into a trance, drifting in a dark and gentle river of memory and sensation as you slowly shed yourself of the world around you in preparation for the next.
10 - Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami (2010).
The much-missed Iranian master updates Journey To Italy for the post-war generations, turning spoken word into action as identities and memories reshape themselves in real-time in a mesmerizing romantic duet carried out to pitch perfection by William Shimell and Juliette Binoche.
9 - The Rider by Chloé Zhao (2018).
Chloé Zhao's patiently-observed dramatization of rodeo cowboy Brady Jandreau's struggles against his circumstances is a work of quietly powerful humanism, solidified by a magnificent central performance from the man himself. In a media landscape saturated with performative progressivism, the stubborn self-effacement with which it allows its subject to speak for itself makes it perhaps the most politically vital work of audiovisual art yet produced in the Trump era.
8 - The We And The I by Michel Gondry (2012).
In the course of a single, prolonged bus ride from school, Michel Gondry analyzes teenage social codes in multiracial Bronx with devastating emotional accuracy. Lucid, playful and transformatively generous, this under-seen gift to the human desire to be enlightened stands as its creator's greatest film as of this writing.
7 - Camille Claudel 1915 by Bruno Dumont (2013).
Two of French cinema's most important figures join forces to humanize a martyrized artist. What they achieve is a sublime portrait that challenges audience assumptions on acting, stardom, faith and ability norms... and inaugurates new roads for each other's respective artform.
6 - Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson (2017).
In what may be the most self-reflective film of his career so far, Paul Thomas Anderson masterfully draws from the aesthetic and moral issues posed by Hitchcockian cinema to deconstruct an artist-muse relationship and expose the emotional voids behind it. And it's still only the second-best dissection of heterosexual relationships that came out this decade...
5 - Melancholia by Lars Von Trier (2011).
Lars Von Trier comes to terms with depression, misanthropy and mortality in his most mature film to date, in which Kirsten Dunst patiently guides us through the end of all things and uncovers what Penn Jillette once described as "The Audacity Of No Hope". Trust cinema's most notorious nihilist to make the end of the world such a life-affirming experience.
4 - Under The Skin by Jonathan Glazer (2014).
Jonathan Glazer evokes Roeg, Hitchcock and Kubrick's combined legacies to highlight the inherent menace in the human gaze - and the male gaze in particular - and in doing so produces a deeply unsettling masterpiece whose sensorial mysteries continue to swim in my mind to this day.
3 - Songs My Brothers Taught Me by Chloé Zhao (2015).
A new filmmaking star explodes into being, in the form of Chloé Zhao and her breathtaking feature-length début. Through the separate paths taken by a Lakota brother and sister after their father's death, Zhao reveals hidden, multi-faceted struggles for connection in a culture fighting to stay alive, bringing timeless expressions and experiences of the human soul to incandescent new light in a film of uncommonly raw power.
2 - Elle by Paul Verhoeven (2016).
Paul Verhoeven and Isabelle Huppert both reach the zenith of their respective careers in a psychosexual maze that systematically laughs at our efforts to apply moral or psychological labels on its beautifully, maddeningly complicated heroine. No film this decade has explored sexual desire, straight or otherwise, with more depth or daring.
1 - The Master by Paul Thomas Anderson (2012).
Movie theatres of the 2010s saw many striking images pass across their screens, but none have had as powerful an impact on me as the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's face filling the frame with angry sorrow, his voice cracking as he softly sings "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China" in parting farewell to the only person with whom he formed anything resembling a meaningful connection. Paul Thomas Anderson's enigmatic reverie, more than any other film this decade, captures with that strange, dark, unmistakable touch of his the unquenchable hunger for kinship we all share as a species yet so often struggle with. As aptly-titled as a work of its calibre ever could be, The Master is the best film of the past ten years.
* as the first two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return were at the 2017 Cannes film festival
**shamefully unread by me as of this writing
