Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

I can't hate Ad Astra because it gave me the best nap I've had in a while.

I don't understand.


45. The Hateful Eight


Because it's a powder keg of tension with some real social relevance that frequently erupts in absurdly satisfying ways.

That's because you're an honourable man.

46. Black Swan (2010)


Year: 2010
Release Date: 12/3/2010
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer(s): Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin
Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 108 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

When Black Swan opened it seemed like something of a companion piece to Darren Aronofsky’s previous film The Wrestler given that both films were about people with very physical jobs at different ends of the show business sophistication spectrum. While there are certainly some similarities between the two Black Swan is also different in key ways and is in many ways a more characteristically Aronofsky freak-out of a movie. Drawing heavily on Roman Polanski, Satoshi Kon, and Powell and Pressburger the film taps into the cinematic language of paranoia in order to put you in the head of a young ballerina as she slowly loses her mind over the course of the film. Aronofsky utilized 16mm film stock for the movie and used a slightly less showy version of the aggressive editing style he developed for Requiem for a Dream in order to keep audiences on edge as they tried to determine what was real and what wasn’t in the film. Despite all that the movie proved to be a hundred million dollar hit at the box office and was embraced by the Academy who gave Natalie Portman a Best Actress Oscar for her bravura work. It’s really kind of crazy how well the movie performed with the mainstream given how weird it is. Cinematic descents into madness don’t generally perform well to the masses and I don’t know that there was anything in the zeitgeist of late 2010 to explain the film’s success beyond the fact that a whole lot of people were just reallyh impressed by the way Aronofsky manages to paint this woman’s mindset.

Back in 2010 I was a little wrapped up in comparing it to The Wrestler, but it stands up a lot more on its own merits when removed from that, especially in the ways it points to another Aronofsky movie.

42. A Prophet

*Though technically released in France until 2009, A Prophet did not receive a North American release until 2010.

Because in a genre often built on reference and parody, this is one modern crime epic that stands uniquely by itself.

No, it's great. But I'm really gonna lose you with my next pick...


41. The Favourite


Because somehow Yorgos Lanthimos was able to make a pretty accessible film without sacrificing his artistic voice and he filled it with some of the best performances of the decade.

Harsh.

45. Roma (2018)


Year: 2018
Release Date: 11/21/2018
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Writer(s): Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Netflix
Country of Origin: Mexico
Language: Spanish
Running Time: 135 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

In 2018 a lot of pundits seemed to be really convinced that Roma, a Spanish language black and white movie that didn’t have a traditional narrative arc, would win Best Picture at the Oscars. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but the very fact that people thought such an overtly “arty” winning that award says something about its power and quality. Roma is an autobiographical film insomuch as it’s about the memories of the writer/director’s youth but rather than narcissistically focusing on himself Alfonso Cuarón opted to instead speculate about the life of someone else from his childhood: the housekeeper who lived his upper middle class home. This social realism is pretty far removed from a blockbuster like Gravity and even from a dystopian future vision like Children of Men, but Cuarón treats this production with the same level of care and the same interest in visual grandeur. Cuarón meticulously re-creates early 1970s Mexico City and uses a somewhat unconventional film grammar that mirrors a sort of hazy memory and employs a lot of impressively long shots including a rather bravura bit toward the end where he manages to film amongst ocean waves. The film’s audio soundscape is also innovative in that it uses no music and really surrounds the audience with ambient sound. At the film’s crescendo personal history combines with national history in a major way which is quietly audacious. I do sort of get why it was only going to get so far with the likes of the Academy, it’s in some ways an easier movie to respect than like, but if it had won that would have been pretty sweet.

44. The Past (2013)


Year: 2013
Release Date: 12/20/2013
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Writer(s): Asghar Farhadi
Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim, and Ali Mosaffa
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: France
Language: French
Running Time: 130 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

There are few tasks as thankless as trying to make the follow-up to an almost universally beloved film that put your name on the map in a big way. The novelty of discovery is gone and almost anything you make will almost certainly be written off as a sophomore slump even if what you make is still better than most of the other films in the marketplace. Such was the situation that the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi faced in making a follow-up to his Academy Award winning film A Seperation, a movie that is loved by pretty much everyone who’s seen it and which easily crossed all sorts of cultural lines to become an Oscar winning international phenomenon. That was always going to be a tough act to follow, and his 2013 film The Past is indeed a lesser work, but it’s still pretty damn amazing. Divorce is once again a topic in the film but isn’t central to it and this time around he’s filming in Paris rather than Iran but a major character is an Iranian national who has traveled to France to finalize a divorce to his wife. I don’t want to get too much into the plot from there because this is a rather underseen film but suffice it to say that it’s another emotional scenario about people at cross purposes. It might be forever doomed to be the Magnificent Amerbsons to A Seperation’s Citizen Kane, but is that really such a terrible thing to be?

The only Wes Anderson movie I like.