Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

Booya! Lincoln!

51. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Year: 2015
Release Date: 5/15/2015
Director: George Miller
Writer(s): George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, and Zoë Kravitz
Based on: Characters created by George Miller
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Country of Origin: Australia
Language: English
Running Time: 120 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

As franchise obsessed as Hollywood is and always has been there was one franchise that really seemed dead it was Mad Max, which is a series that hadn’t had a new installment since before I was born despite having had a pretty noticeable effect on culture. This was probably because the series had long been associated with Mel Gibson and he had moved on to bigger things and because the original films were kind of in a gray zone between cult success and actual mainstream success. So suffice it to say I did not expect a reboot of the franchise would lead to one of the decade’s most critically acclaimed films and I certainly didn’t think that the person to do it would be the franchise’s original creator George Miller, who had kept kind of a low profile through much of the 90s and 2000s. Yet somehow everything came together and a rather amazing action movie was the result. The film had exciting action, some amazing visuals, and even a surprisingly large amount of political relevance. I loved the movie but I never quite went as all in on it as some critics and I think that’s largely because I think Mad Max himself is kind of devoid of personality and is almost a non-entity in his own movie despite seemingly being the film’s point of view character. That’s kind of a problem I had with the old movies in this franchise too but it’s a little more glaring here when everything else is so amazing. It’s still an amazing movie despite that Achilles heel and certainly belongs on any list of the best movies of the decade even if it’s a little lower on my list than it would be on some peoples'.

Nice. I'm a big fan of Dunkirk.

54. The House That Jack Built


Because I don't know how the fuck Lars Von Trier got away with this, but I've never felt so guilty for laughing my ass off in a theater.

49. Mustang (2015)


Year: 2015
Release Date: 11/20/2015
Director: Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Writer(s): Deniz Gamze Ergüven and Alice Winocour
Starring: Güneş Şensoy, Doğa Doğuşlu, and Elit İşcan
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Cohen Media Group
Country of Origin: France
Language: Turkish
Running Time: 97 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

In 2016 director Deniz Gamze Ergüven released her sophomore effort, Kings, which is a film I have not seen but it certainly looks wretched. That Halle Berry/Daniel Craig Rodney King Riots film got a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and is perhaps one of this decades biggest disappointments given that Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang was one of the most promising first features of the year. That film was set in Turkey, the country she emigrated from to France when she was young and in some ways the film feels like a sort of worst case scenario of what might have happened to her if her parents hadn’t moved. In it we watch five sisters who appear to have been orphaned and raised by their more conservative relatives and are basically forbidden from leaving the house and are being groomed to be married off at a relatively young age without any other option. It’s a situation that bears some similarities to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides but here it feels more like a social critique than a thought experiment. Despite the fairly grim situation the film is actually rather rich with life and really brings the spirit of these girls alive. The title is a sort of metaphor for the vibrancy of the characters which can’t be contained by even these awful conditions. Hopefully Ergüven gets it together for film number three because if her debut is any indication there’s a lot of potential in her.

Ian’s favorite movie

Damn right it is.

A social distancing effect?

48. Leviathan (2014)


Year: 2014
Release Date: 12/25/2014
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Writer(s): Andrey Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin
Starring: Aleksei Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, and Roman Madyanov
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: Russia
Language: Russian
Running Time: 141 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Andrey Zvyagintsev has only made five movies over the course of a nearly twenty year career but despite that, and despite the fact that I have no idea how to pronounce his name, he’s pretty clearly the most important filmmaker to come out of Russia and Leviathan is probably the most important film of his career. The film is about a sort of battle of wills between a corrupt mayor that wants to seize a man’s home through a sort of eminent domain and the guy who refuses to sell and stands up to him. That’s the kind of set-up that could easily lend itself to a sort of cheesy movie about the little man overcoming adversity, but there’s none of that here. Instead the movie plays out like a sort of rumination on the biblical Book of Job with a man having his life getting worse and worse from his strict adherence to principals, but here our protagonist isn’t being tested by god (the movie is deeply anti-clerical) but by societal corruption in the form of both the government and the church. It’s a deeply cynical movie in which ordinary people are basically powerless when standing up to corruption and while it sympathizes with the guy on the receiving end of this trauma it doesn’t necessarily valorize him either. That’s what the movie is doing on a macro level anyway, but while you’re watching it the film doesn’t play like an on-the-nose parable, a lot of it actually concerns the protagonist’s day-to-day life and the breakdown of his family. It’s a dense movie with a lot going on in it and it’s not always a “fun” movie to watch, but it’s a deeply subversive movie that does not pull its punches.

48. Shame


Because Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen are a match made in heaven and I hope they make more movies together.

If I had expanded my list beyond 30, Shame would've definitely been on mine as well.

46. Ad Astra


Because it's a heartwrenching journey and a great sci-fi odyssey and I really don't get why so many of you seem to hate it.