Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

Jared Fogle is a Saint.

Former spokesman for Subway, who just so happened to be a pedophile. No big deal.

Ohhh yeah, he was there.

I thought about posting "I can't jack off to this" but I thought the moment was over.

Thank you Doomsday for bringing it back.

We do not whack until the kids die.

Gripping da Wang.

BROUGHT IT BACK!

I specialize in the stupidest.

5. Inception (2010)


Year: 2010
Release Date: 7/16/2010
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer(s): Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 148 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is the only film in my top ten to be made by a major studio and one of the only movies in my top fifty that could be described as a “blockbuster action movie.” So yes, that means that the Hollywood machine’s efforts in the decade peaked about seven months into 2010. In fact Inception kind of loomed large over the rest of Hollywood’s increasingly mechanized attempts at big budget entertainment over the course of the 2010s. With it Christopher Nolan proved rather definitively that Hollywood was capable of making movies that looked and felt more substantial than what Disney was giving us while still being a fucking blast. Make no mistake, Inception is very much an action movie. Most of the characters are armed and they frequently engage in shootouts, fist fights, and car stunts and at its heart the film is also essentially a heist movie with everything that that entails, but it does all of this in increasingly novel ways. The film’s concept of entering someone’s subconscious and going on an adventure there frees Nolan up to do a lot of cool stuff but he also diligently avoids making the film a free for all and instead gives his characters meticulous rules to follow and an elaborate structure in which different levels of the mind run on different timelines. It’s a four quadrant PG-13 movie but in many ways it looks more like an adult action movie than most tent poles of the time. It has a killer ensemble cast headed by Leonardo Di Caprio (who would prove to be one of the last true movie stars over the course of a decade), and each of them cruise through this experience wearing slick suits and carrying themselves with a sort of wealthy adult confidence. There’s a fairly credible fan theory that the movie is meant as something of an allegory for filmmaking with each character representing a different facet of the craft. It’s a fun lens to view the film through, but hardly an essential one, and there’s more fun to be had simply looking at it as a journey that its protagonist goes through as he puts himself through a mind bending ringer to finally put his life back together, a ringer that he may or may not have even gotten out of depending on how you interpret the film’s positively iconic final shot.

Racist.

Racist.

4. Son of Saul (2015)


Year: 2015
Release Date: 12/18/2015
Director: László Nemes
Writer(s): László Nemes and Clara Royer
Starring: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, and Urs Rechn
Based on: N/A
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Country of Origin: Hungary
Language: Hungarian
Running Time: 107 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

The Holocaust is never an easy subject to make movies about, though there is a long history of attempts and in many ways it had felt like it had explored in every way it could have been, then came Son of Saul. Where most movies about the Holocaust focus on stories on the genocide’s periphery, this one goes right into Auschwitz in on order to stare right into the abyss. The film focuses on a member of the Sonderkommando: a group of Holocaust victims who would be separated from the rest of the victims and forced at gunpoint to act as trustees at the death camps and shepherd other Jews to their deaths. They are a controversial element of Shoah studies and they had been explored previously in Tim Blake Nelson’s film The Grey Zone, and as grim as that movie was it wasn’t visceral, Son of Saul by contrast is extremely visceral. The film is not a million miles removed from the sort of “experience” movies from this decade like Gravity and 1917, but in my view it is using this technique to a much more profound end, namely creating empathy for the people who went through what is likely the most horrifying experience of the 20th century. Throughout the film the camera almost always follows the film’s protagonist; a man who has a “break” at some point in the film and comes to believe on of the victims is his son whom he must try to bury. It’s not a single take stunt, there are cuts in the movie, but it sticks with the one character over the course of what is a more or less real time span and because the camera is basically over the guy’s shoulder a lot of the most grisly aspects are tastefully out of focus in a way that almost makes them more disturbing. This is one of only six movies on this list that is a feature film debut of its director and the fact that László Nemes chose such a project to tackle on his first go as a filmmaker is astonishing. This is not a “fun” movie to watch, in fact it’s an experience that will leave you rather shell-shocked, but it’s a film that leaves you feeling like you’ve had at least a slight glimpse at the human experience at its worst and that is something that puts a lot of things into perspective.