Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

15. Parasite (2019)

Year: 2019
Release Date: 11/8/2019
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Writer(s): Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Lee Jung-eun, and Jang Hye-jin
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Neon
Country of Origin: South Korea
Language: Korean
Running Time: 132 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

For me the historic Oscar winning success of Parasite kind of came out of nowhere. Bong Joon-ho had of course emerged as a filmmaker to watch but I’d never personally been a huge fan and he certainly didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would impress the likes of the Academy. His other two major films this decade, Snowpiercer and Okja, had been interesting if rather imperfect English language genre exercises that were trying to make points about capitalism using rather clumsy science fiction metaphors. Parasite in many ways strips Bong’s recent output down and presents a more bare bones but in no way less entertaining thriller that indicts capitalism just as hard but also refuses to make things simple for anyone involved. The film expertly blends disparate genres like heist movies, conman thrillers, dark comedies, and a pinch of horror to create an accessible yarn that has you closely following the exploits of these really well defined characters who each manage to build distinct personalities over a rather short running time. Things start out rather lighthearted but at the film’s midpoint we get an extended set-piece which kind of shifts the film’s tone and starts taking it in a different and more prickly direction and from there things start to get distinctly darker but in a way that feels natural and of a piece with what came before. It’s a film about class warfare, and while you don’t need to engage in that aspect of it if you don’t want to, it is deeper than it first appears.

14. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)


Year: 2018
Release Date: 12/14/2018
Director: Barry Jenkins
Writer(s): Barry Jenkins
Starring: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, and Brian Tyree Henry
Based on: The novel "If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin
Distributor: Annapurna 
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 117 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.00:1

Moonlight was almost certainly a tough if not impossible act to follow but Barry Jenkins shot for the moon with his next effort and in my view he managed to do even better. With his newfound clout Jenkins opted to bring a James Baldwin novel to the screen, which is ambitious given that Baldwin’s work had rarely been adapted at all previously and certainly not adapted well. And the novel he chose was not one of Baldwin’s most famous works, it was one of his less read later works, but it turns out to have been rather well chosen given its focus on the hot topic of the way African Americans are treated in the criminal justice system. At its center the film is a romance which shows through flashbacks the budding of what should be a happy and prosperous family but the couple find themselves being undercut at pretty much every stage of their relationship by systemic racism, most egregiously when one of them is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. The film is plainly more overtly political than Moonlight was but as palpable as the injustice against Fonny is the film does ultimately feel more like a sort of tragic romance than it does an “issue” movie. On top of all that, Barry Jenkins visual filmmaking here is just immaculate. If Moonlight gave us a taste of how great this guy could make a movie look If Beale Street Could Talk is the feast that Jenkins and his team were capable of. It’s a movie that’s beautiful, touching, and socially conscious and it will forever be bizarre to me that critics didn’t manage to champion this to even greater heights than Moonlight went to.

Yeah, don't really get why it wasn't championed harder.

Totally, one of my favorite soundtracks in recent memory. Also a great movie.

13. Certified Copy (2011)


Year: 2011
Release Date: 3/25/2011
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Writer(s): Abbas Kiarostami
Starring: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sundance Selects
Country of Origin: Italy
Language: French/English
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

In 2010, thirty seven years into his distinguished career, Abbas Kiarostami underwent a bit of a reinvention and entered a new phase of his career. It wasn’t a long lasting career phase as Kiarostami tragically died at 76 six years later (I believe this has the distinction of being the only movie on this list directed by someone who has since passed away), but it and his Japanese set follow-up Like Someone In Love suggested something of a new way of working for the filmmaker where he would work outside of his native Iran and with professional actors. Set in Italy but starring the French actress Juliette Binoche and the British opera singer William Shimell as two people who may or may not have ever been in a relationship meeting to discuss a book he’s recently written about the value of copied art and any number of other intellectual topics and over the course of their day it begins to sound like they aren’t the strangers they appeared to be and may have instead been former lovers who were playing some kind of game earlier. Kiarostami has of course always been a rather meta filmmaker who sets out to challenge our usual notions of narrative but there’s a certain playfulness this time around that feels distinct from what came before. In some ways the film operates on the same “it’s fascinating to watch smart people talk at length” level as Richard Linklater’s “Before” movies but there isn’t really anything “romantic” about Certified Copy even when it does start getting into the complexities of relationships. The whole film is a wonderful bit of intellectual game playing, the kind of smart international cinema that thrived in the 60s and 70s and which we don’t get as much of these days.

I should probably rewatch Certified Copy. I certainly remember liking the movie, but it didn't hit me on this kind of profound level.

12. Jackie (2016)

Year: 2016
Release Date: 12/2/2016
Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer(s): Noah Oppenheim
Starring: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and John Hurt
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 100 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1

In and of itself nothing about “Jackie Kennedy biopic” really excited me when I heard this was getting made and even when I heard that the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín would be directing it wasn’t among the films I was most looking forward to but that was clearly a mistake. Back in 2016 the film was largely viewed in terms of Natalie Portman’s lead performance, which is indeed amazingly good, but that kind of unfairly overshadowed what is an amazing film overall. Larraín used some of the tricks he gained from making films like No, namely the incorporation of stock footage into historical narratives and shot the film in 16mm both to better match that footage and to give it an extra dose of intimacy. The film opts not to look at the full sweep of Jackie’s life but to specifically focus in on her time immediately after her husband’s assassination where she goes through something of an existential journey to contemplate what her life has meant up to this point and where she’ll go from there. Through this she’s able to explore her grief both in practical and spiritual terms but also the role she played in building certain myths about her slain husband and in shaping his legacy. It’s the movie from this decade that most desperately needs to be given a second look because it’s a tour-de-force of both writing and filmmaking that deserves a towering legacy of its own.

11. Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Year: 2013
Release Date: 10/25/2013
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Writer(s): Abdellatif Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix
Starring: Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos
Based on: The graphic novel "Blue is the Warmest Color" by Julie Maroh
Distributor: Sundance Selects
Country of Origin: France
Language: French
Running Time: 179 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

When Blue is the Warmest Color opened at Cannes in 2013 it was a Palme d’Or winning triumph which was widely beloved but from the very beginning there was suspicion about how necessary its extended graphic lesbian sex scenes were and what motivations director Abdellatif Kechiche had in including them, complaints that were bolstered by some stories about how things were conducted on the set. While I always had some concerns about those on set stories, when analyzing the actual movie I found most of the concerns about the male gaze to be off base for a variety of reasons and championed the film as among the best of its year. In the years since Kechiche has done some things both inside and outside of his work that have made him a bit harder to defend and do lead me to think that some of his interest in lesbian sexuality here was prurient. That having been said, I am generally of the belief that authorial intent has its limits for both good and ill and that at the end of the day it’s the film itself that needs to be assessed free of extra-textual suspicions. Additionally, I’ve pointed out from the beginning that the sex scenes in the movie make up some five to ten minutes of a three hour runtime and that even if you truly do believe that those scenes are indefensible I still think there’s a lot of greatness in the film outside of them. The film is essentially a close examination of a short relationship between two young women in all its detail and really has you witness the both of them change and grow and eventually grow apart. This close detailed examination is what ultimately got it in trouble as it was seemingly what drove him to also show as much as he did about their time in the bedroom, after all, sex is a major part of most adult relationships and it would seem dishonest to not show that part of it as well. I’m probably going to have to continue to reassess how I feel about that one, especially if Kechiche keeps doing questionable things, but for now I’m not giving up on it.

10. A Prophet (2010)


Year: 2010
Release Date: 3/26/2010
Director: Jacques Audiard
Writer(s): Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri, and Nicolas Peufaillit
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, and Adel Bencherif
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: France
Language: French
Running Time: 155 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

A Prophet kind of fell between the cracks when I was doing my year-end list making back in 2010. At the time I was viewing it more as a 2009 film which I had missed but it never actually played American theaters until 2010 and under my current criteria it would count as a 2010 film and is eligible for this list. The film is the work of Jacques Audiard, a French auteur who has been working since the mid-90s but who really came into his own with this movie and has maintained an uneven but interesting track record since then. The film is one part prison movie and one part gangster movie in that it’s about a small time criminal who starts the movie in jail and over the course of his sentence does favors for the right people and becomes something of a “player” and by the end of the film has become something of a small-time Scarface. It’s an interesting twist on the familiar “rise and fall” crime narrative, especially given that there isn’t really a “fall” here. I’m not sure that Audiard has any particular political statement to make about crime or the prison system. There could be something to be said for the fact that prison essentially makes his protagonist a more dedicated criminal than he was going in but he’s not really pointing out any particular systemic failing that caused this. Rather I think he’s just trying to tell a really good story and that makes this highly accessible as foreign art films go. Over the course of the decade it’s been something of a go-to for me as a movie to show friends who aren’t major film buff but who are open-minded enough to watch something a little different than what they’re used to and were it in English I think it would be held up right next to things like The Godfather and Goodfellas in the sort of cannon of smart but highly watchable crime movies.

He's just warming us up for Avengement at #11

Great movie.