Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

79. Birds of Passage (2019)



Year: 2019
Release Date: 2/13/2019
Director: Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego
Writer(s): Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal
Starring: Carmiña Martínez, Natalia Reyes, and José Acosta
Based on: N/A
Distributor: The Orchard
Country of Origin: Colombia
Language: Wayuu
Running Time: 125 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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 (2013)



Year: 2013
Release Date: 10/4/2013
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Writer(s): Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón
Starring: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Country of Origin: USA
Language: English
Running Time: 91 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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 (2019)


Year: 2019
Release Date: 12/25/2019
Director: Greta Gerwig
Writer(s): Greta Gerwig
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, and Chris Cooper
Based on: The novel "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Country of Origin: USA
Language: English
Running Time: 135 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

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 (2011)


Year: 2011
Release Date: 12/2/2011
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer(s): Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, and Nicole Beharie
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Country of Origin: USA
Language: English
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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 probabaly his finest performance of the decade and while McQueen’s other work slightly overshadow it, it shouldn’t be forgotten.

Nice pick, Contagion is a cool movie.

73. No (2013)


Year: 2013
Release Date: 2/15/2013
Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer(s): Pedro Peirano
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Luis Gnecco, Néstor Cantillana, Antonia Zegers, and Marcial Tagle
Based on: The play "El Plebiscito" by Antonio Skármeta
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: Chile
Language: Spanish
Running Time: 118 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

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.

Contagion sure is a timely choice right now.

71. A Ghost Story (2017)


Year: 2017
Release Date: 7/7/2017
Director: David Lowery
Writer(s): David Lowery
Starring: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, and Will Oldham
Based on: N/A
Distributor: A24
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 92 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

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.

69. Gone Girl (2014)

Year: 2014
Release Date: 10/3/2014
Director: David Fincher
Writer(s): Gillian Flynn
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Emily Ratajkowski, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry
Based on: The novel "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 149 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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.

Disney's Gone Girl