Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

Weird how that turned out, also weird that they showed up right as his R-rated Basketball Mighty Ducks movie came out. As for To the Wonder, kind of a matter of perspective how high it is, any previous Malick movie would have easily danced into the top fifty or top twenty.  

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say the answer is yes.

The Dark Knight Rises will not be on the list.  Avengers: Infinity War will be the one and only superhero movie on the list.

That placing seems about right for gone girl. Solid thriller with some campy paperback novel tendencies.

He did it to himself when he made Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

67. Us (2019)


Year: 2019
Release Date: 3/22/2019
Director: Jordan Peele
Writer(s): Jordan Peele
Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Universal
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 116 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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 (2017)


Year: 2017
Release Date: 10/19/2017
Director: Ruben Östlund
Writer(s): Ruben Östlund
Starring: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, and Terry Notary
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Magnolia
Country of Origin: Sweden
Language: Swedish
Running Time: 151 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

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 (2016)


Year: 2016
Release Date: 12/9/2016
Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer(s): Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, and Rosemarie DeWitt
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Lionsgate
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 128 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.55:1

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.

Damn right it is.

63. First Reformed (2017)


Year: 2017
Release Date: 5/18/2017
Director: Paul Schrader
Writer(s): Paul Schrader
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger, and Cedric Kyles
Based on: N/A
Distributor: A24
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 113 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

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.

Word.