Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

19. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Year: 2014
Release Date: 10/17/2014
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Writer(s): Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo
Starring: Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, and Naomi Watts
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 119 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

When Birdman came out in 2014 it became something of a whipping boy for a certain group of critics for reasons I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now. A lot of people were heavily against Alejandro González Iñárritu’s previous films because of their dour nature, which I suppose I understand, but those complaints would seem to have little bearing on his fifth and by far lightest film. Set in the world of New York theater, the film focuses in on the mental breakdown of a Hollywood actor as he tries to reinvent himself as a serious stage actor. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki used a variety of tricks in order to make the film appear to have been shot in a single take despite taking place over the course of several days and involving several fantasy sequences with heavy visual effects. This shooting style give the film some of the feeling of a stage play, which is appropriate given the milieu in which it’s set and it also gives a certain kinetic energy to the backstage goings-on. As the film goes on Iñárritu and his co-screenwriters provide a rather biting parody of the entertainment industry in the 2010s and the spectrum of good intentions and egotistical nonsense that goes into making art in the modern era. It’s certainly the most formally adventurous of the ten movies to win Best Picture during the decade and in many ways the most entertaining.

Too low if you ask me.  But, hey, Top 20 ain't bad.

18. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Year: 2013
Release Date: 12/6/2014
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Writer(s): Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham, and Justin Timberlake
Based on: N/A
Distributor: CBS Films
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 105 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

One of the most awarded movies of the 2010s is La La Land, a movie about the nobility of following your dreams even when the odds seem to be against you. The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is in many ways about the dark side of following your dreams, about what happens when things don’t work out from you and when the world does not reward your artistry. Of course the person at the center of the film, the titular Llewyn Davis, is in many ways just as responsible as anyone for his own failures. Set in the 60s Greenwich Village Folk scene the film follows Davis has he tries to get over the loss of his former bandmate while also trying to get together enough money to get by all while maintaining artistic integrity. The film’s music, overseen by T Bone Burnett, is quite strong and throughout the movie you are convinced that Davis is indeed someone deserving of some success but he’s also pretty flawed as a person. He’s rarely vindictive but you can tell he’s a bit of a misanthrope and isn’t above burning bridges as he moves through life. It’s a bit more of a downer than your average Coen Brothers movie, but some of their dry wit is still present and they end the movie in an unconventional way that almost seems to invoke Buddhist principles of repeating cycles of life.

I flirted with putting Inside Llewyn Davis on my list for a while.  I do love the movie, but I’ve still only seen it once, so I figured I owed it a re-watch.  Just never got around to it in time.

All of the movies on my list I've seen more than once and could more confidently assess their placement in relation to each other.  But with Llewyn...the last time I saw it was six (?) years ago and I just felt like it earned another watch, just to be sure.

17. The Hateful Eight (2015)


Year: 2015
Release Date: 12/25/2015
Director: Quentin Tarantino 
Writer(s): Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks, and Channing Tatum
Based on: N/A
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 187 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.76:1

It is quite the irony of history that Quentin Tarantino made his eighth film The Hateful Eight over a decade before Donald Trump was allowed into the white house. Granted, Trump was on the political scene in the December of 2015 as his primary campaign was well under way, but Tarantino certainly wouldn’t have known that when he was writing or filming the movie. Despite the timing Tarantino certainly seemed to anticipate the wildly polarized political tone of the second half of the decade with his film, a tense “snow western” in which several unpleasant people from different parts of the country find themselves holed up in a remote building where they unleash all their post-Civil War resentments upon one another. The film doesn’t play the “very fine people on both sides” game of suggesting that all these people are silly in their resentments, on the contrary it’s sympathies lie pretty firmly on the side of Samuel L. Jackson’s former buffalo soldier rather than the former confederates played by Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern, but it does suggest that both sides are being played against each other by a rather Trump-like villain who they should be working together against. When I first saw the film I ended up writing a rather lengthy review where I pegged each character as representative of one political entity or another, and I might have been over-analyzing it a bit when I did that, but there’s definitely something going on beneath the surface of this thing that’s very emblematic of what’s going on today. But you don’t need to obsess over that to like the film. This is still very much a Quentin Tarantino movie and has most of the hallmarks that has made him one of the dominant voices in cinema like its non-chronological narrative, its canny cinematic homages, intense bursts of violence, and its bristling back and forth dialogue.

Made. He's written well over eight what with True Romance, From Dusk til Dawn, and whatnot.

16. Mother! (2017)


Year: 2017
Release Date: 9/15/2017
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer(s): Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Paramount
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 121 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

After the surprise financial success of Black Swan left Darren Aronofsky with more studio clout that he ever had or probably ever will have. He cashed that in to make the Noah’s Ark movie that no one wanted and while that movie wasn’t uninteresting it certainly didn’t quite cohere. After that experience making an on the nose PG-rated bible movie he found himself making an extremely R-rated movie that was also secretly about the bible. The resulting film was one of the decade’s most divisive and polarizing movies. Mainstream audiences hated this thing, it got an F Cinemascore and people who went into it expecting more of a conventional horror movie had no idea what to make of what they were given. I loved it. Ignore any subtext and you’re still given this really intense and weird experience with the Jennifer Lawrence character going through what is essentially an introvert’s nightmare where she needs to deal with these crowds who enter her life and refuse to leave which manifests itself in increasingly surreal ways as the movie goes on. Then there’s the subtext, which is increasingly malleable depending on the viewer. In the movie’s wake a lot of people accused it of have a very “obvious” meaning and yet many of them seemed to have different ideas of what this “obvious” theme was with some saying it was about environmentalism, some saying it was about religion, some saying it was about the relationship between artist and muse. It’s actually probably a combination of all those things. Aronofsky reportedly wrote the movie in a five day burst of creativity and the film feels like a sort of creative freak out where the guy let loose with everything that’s important to him and resulting film feels like a chaotic expression of what life in the late 2010s feels like at times.

I respect your gall, if not the choice.

Rank your preference: Killing of a Sacred Deer, Mother!, and Wolf of Wall Street