Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

Nice choices, Drac. I haven't seen Poetry or 20th Century Women, but both sound fascinating.

68. Uncut Gems


Because I reflexively fist-pumped when Kevin Garnet sunk a basket, which is all the proof I need that the Safdie Brothers really had their hooks in me.

59. BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017)



Year: 2017
Release Date: 8/23/2017
Director: Robin Campillo
Writer(s): Robin Campillo and Philippe Mangeot
Starring: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, and Antoine Reinartz
Based on: N/A
Distributor: The Orchard
Country of Origin: France
Language: French
Running Time: 140 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

The 2010s were the decade when the AIDS crisis really went from being a current events story to being a historical event to look back on. Hollywood responded to this by making the turgid Oscar bait Dallas Buyers Club but the French filmmaker Robin Campillo drew on his own past as an ACT UP protester to make BPM (Beats per Minute), a film that takes an on the ground look at an activist cell who was at ground zero of the epidemic. Campillo had previously triumphed as one of the screenwriters of the 2008 film The Class (Entre les murs), which gained power by letting the camera sit back and watch as a group of students debate out various points with their teacher and this directorial effort takes a similar approach by almost making it seem like the camera is a fly on the wall as the various activists debate amongst themselves what they stand for and what they want to do. It also follows the activists out into the field as they engage in their protests, some of which are a little debatable in how far they go. Then as the film goes on it starts to be more about the personal lives of these activists and how they deal with their own illnesses and their likely fates at a time when there was no reliable treatment for it. Sections of the movie work better than others, but as portraits of the ACT UP era go this is one of the best to come along since the time itself.

66. The Babadook


Because I love the merger of supernatural horror and thematic examination, and because The Babadook was arguably the start of a great wave in modern horror.

This is quite the coincidence

58. The Babadook (2014)


Year: 2014
Release Date: 11/28/2014
Director: Jennifer Kent
Writer(s): Jennifer Kent
Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall, Barbara West, and Ben Winspear
Based on: N/A
Distributor: IFC Films
Country of Origin: Australia
Language: English
Running Time: 94 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

The second half of the 2010s saw a sudden insurgence of “elevated horror” movies and while The Babadook wasn’t my favorite of these movies it does seem to be the first one to have arrived and sort of foretold the trend even if it may not have directly caused it. The film also foretold another major theme within late 2010s culture: an increased focus on everyday mental health and depression. The film starts as an empathetic look at a single mother’s struggles to raise an autistic kid while mourning the death of her husband but then adds an element of supernatural horror that ends up being a metaphor for her own internalized struggles. But even if you don’t get too deep into the subtext there’s some pretty innovative horror stuff going on here. The film ekes some pretty effective chills out of something as simple as showing the inside of a rather creepy pop-up book and there’s a bit with silent movie imagery that really stands out. It was a movie I had somewhat under-estimated when it first came out. It came amidst the post-Paranormal Activity glut of movies about haunted houses and I was prone to look at just about any movie involving a haunting with a bit of a side-eye, but removed from that the movie’s obvious creativity shines and it’s rightly become something of a classic horror movie of the era.

Ba-ba-doooooooooooook.

57. Silver Linings Playbook (2012)


Year: 2012
Release Date: 11/16/2012
Director: David O Russell
Writer(s): David O Russell
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Anupam Kher, and Chris Tucker
Based on: The novel "The Silver Linings Playbook" by Matthew Quick
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 122 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

There are a lot of movies that gain a lot by being in the thick of award season and bartering in prestige but I also think that sort of thing can backfire at times and I think something like that happened with David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which was being sold as some sort of deep probing look at mental illness when it is actually a romantic comedy, and probably the best romantic comedy of the 20th Century. The film is part of a series of films that David O Russell made in the 2010s which were considered something of a comeback for the director after he spent the previous decade only making a single completed film and earning something of a reputation for volatility. This new cycle of films from him focused on eccentric working class families in East Coast cities and Silver Linings Playbook was the most successful of them. It focused primarily on a recently divorced Philadelphia man who has come to learn that he suffers from bi-polar disorder and is trying to rebuild his life again. There’s a certain sadness buried in that setup but the movie is never dower and is in fact very funny for much of its running time. The whole family at the center of the film has all sorts of amusing habits and when Jennifer Lawrence enters the film it starts to turn into become something of an unusual romance. It’s a film that fits the form of the romcom without indulging the clichés of what that genre had become and being made with much more thought and skill than what we’re used to from such films and when it gets to the feel good ending it genuinely feels earned.

63. Contagion


Because obviously it turned out to be pretty fucking prophetic.

I was actually thinking of re-watching Contagion this weekend.

Get a room.

56. Nymphomaniac (2014)



Year: 2014
Release Date: 3/6/2014
Director: Lars Von Trier
Writer(s): Lars Von Trier
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stacy Martin, Stellan Skarsgård, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth, and Udo Kier
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Magnolia
Country of Origin: Denmark
Language: English
Running Time: 241 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Lars Von Trier’s films are often judged in terms of their provocations rather than their filmmaking but after his 2011 film Melancholia got a more straightforwardly positive reception he must have been left with some pent up need to push buttons because his follow-up was 241 minutes of incitement. Though split into two films upon release for commercial purposes this is pretty clearly a single movie which tells a sort of shaggy dog story about the life of a sexually promiscuous woman. Despite the running time and the graphic sex scenes and the general political incorrectness of the whole thing this is actually one of Von Trier's lighter and more accessible movies and there’s a certain looseness to the whole thing with Von Trier happily moving the story in all sorts of different directions. It’s like the White Album of Lars Von Trier movies. The film features Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin (in her debut performance) as the protagonist at different stages of her life and both give rather fearless performances. Different celebrities come into and out of the woman’s life like Shia LaBeouf and Christian Slater and the film gets a certain charge out of the fact that Von Trier has managed to get such people involved in his wacky vision and certain stand-out episodes include a tryst with a strange sexual game on a train, a sexaholics anonymous meeting that goes awry, and a scene involving Uma Thurman which is possibly the most outrageous exercises in awkwardness ever filmed. All of this is strung together with a framing story in which Gainsbourg tells all of this to a character played by Stellan Skarsgård who tries to intellectualize her various escapades in ways that are interesting while kind of hilariously missing the point. It’s a wild fun ride of a movie, albeit one made for people who are in touch with a very specific sensibility.