Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

96. Blue Jasmine (2013)

Year: 2013
Release Date: 8/23/2013
Director: Woody Allen
Writer(s): Woody Allen
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Sally Hawkins, Peter Sarsgaard, and Michael Stuhlbarg
Based on: N/A 
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 98 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
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 (2011)

Year: 2011
Release Date: 12/20/2011
Director: David Fincher
Writer(s): Steven Zaillian
Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Steven Berkoff, and Robin Wright
Based on: The Novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 158 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
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.

79. Everybody Wants Some!!


Because no one makes deceptively simple hangout movies better than Richard Linklater.

The one Wes Anderson movie I like.

Who are you and what have you done with Dracula?

91. Midsommar (2019)

Year: 2019
Release Date: 7/10/2019
Director: Ari Aster
Writer(s): Ari Aster
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, and Will Poulter
Based on: N/A
Distributor: A24
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 148 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.00:1

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.

Midsommar better than Hereditary? That's gonna be a yikes from me, Hoss.

Yeah, gonna have to slap a big fat "Disagree" on the claim that Midsommar is better than Hereditary.

The Farewell juuuuust missed my Top Ten of 2019 list.

Fuckin' right Whiplash.

89. The Raid (2012)


Year: 2012
Release Date: 4/13/2012
Director: Gareth Evans
Writer(s): Gareth Evans
Starring: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno, Ray Sahetapy, and Tegar Sathya
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: Indonesia
Language: Indonesian
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

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.